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191^

THE LAST ABBOT OF GLASTONBURY
AND HIS COMPANIONS.

The Arms of Richard Whiting,
the last Abbot of Glastonbury,
from a MS. in the College of Arms.

11

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THE
LAST ABBOT OF GLASTONBURY
and his
COMPANIONS
AN HISTORICAL SKETCH

FRANCIS AIDAN GASQUET, D.D.
©f tbe ®r_e. of St. JBene&ict

SIMPKIN MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & Co., Ltd.

1S95

LONDON : (
PRINTED BY \>
JOHN BALE AND SONS, ^
OXFORD HOUSE, i
GREAT TITCHFIELD STREET, W.

¦ji

MU-,_

G

3
22 •

J

DILECTIS • FRATRIBVS
MONACHIS ¦ CONGREGATIONIS ANGLICANAE
ORDINIS SANCTI BENEDICTI
ET - VOBIS • PRAESERTIM
CARIS ¦ SODALIBVS
MONASTERII • SANCTI • GREGORII ¦ MAGNI • DE ¦ DOWNSIDE
A ¦ PATRIBVS ¦ PRO • FIDE • EXSULANTIBVS
DVACI OLIM ¦ CONDITI
QVI IN PATRIAM ¦ REDUCES
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VENERABILIS ¦ GLASTONIENSIS • ECCLESIAE
FELICITER • SEDETIS
ATQVE IN • TERRA ¦ TOT • SANCTORVM ¦ MEMORIIS • CONSECRATA
MOREM VITAE • TENETIS
A DIVO PATRE BENEDICTO • TRADITVM
DEDICATVR HOC OPVS ¦ GRATISSIMI CORDIS
IN ¦ HONOREM MARTYRVM
FLORVM • HVIVS • ANGLIAE ¦ NOSTRAE
NECNON • EIVSDEM ¦ REGVLAE
SVB ¦ QVA ¦ NOS IPSI • MILITAMVS
INTER • QVOS ¦ EMINET
VIR ¦ VENERABILIS • ET • VLTIMVS • GLASTONIAE • ABBAS
RICHARDVS
IPSE • CVM CONSORTIBVS •• SVI • MARTYRII
PRO • NOBIS • AC PRO PATRIA - INTERCEDAT

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I. PAGE
Glastonbury ... ... ... ... ... i
CHAPTER II.
Richard Whiting ... ... ... ... 14
CHAPTER III.
Richard Whiting Elected Abbot , ... ... 31
CHAPTER IV.
Troubles in Church and State ... ... ... 41
CHAPTER V.
Richard Whiting as Abbot of Glastonbury ... 55
CHAPTER VI.
The Beginning of the End ... ... ... 82
CHAPTER VII
The Martyrdom ... ... ... ... ... 106
CHAPTER VIII.
Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading ... ... ... 121
CHAPTER IX.
The Last Abbot of Colchester ... ... ... 159

Appendix I. ... ... ... ... ... 177
Appendix II. ... ... ... ... ... 182

"S.

#«&_».&&.*»-

View of Glastonbury and the Tor (from Hollar's print).

Face ti.

THE LAST ABBOT OF
GLASTONBURY.

CHAPTER I.
Glastonbury.

THE prospect from the Roman camp of
Masbury, on the Mendip hills of Somer
set, is one to be remembered. The country-
presents itself to the view as in a map. In
front a vast plain stretches out into the dim
blue horizon across Dorsetshire to the' shores
of the English Channel. To the east the hills
fall and rise like the swell of the sea in a series
of vales and heights till they are lost in the
distance. Westward the landscape is more
varied, the ground, which at the spectator's
feet had attained well-nigh to the dignity of a
mountain, sinks away in a succession of terraces
to the level country lying between it and the
waters of the Severn sea. From the midst

2 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
of this plain there rises clear and sharp against
the sky, like a pyramid, a hill crowned with
a tower, which forms from all points the most
marked feature of the scene. Neither the
glancing of the sunlight from the surface of
the sea some fifteen miles away, nor the
glimpse that is caught between the trees
of the grey towers and gables of the great
cathedral church of Wells, nor yet the sight of
the spire of Doulting, calling up as it does
memories of Saint Aldhelm, can long restrain
the eye from turning once again to gaze on the
conical hill with its tower which stands out in
the landscape. Remarkable alike in its con
tour and in its situation, these do not consti
tute its chief attraction, for it speaks not only
to the eye but to the mind also ; it is Nature's
monument marking a spot of more than ordi
nary interest. The shadows of tradition seem
still to hover over the hill and recall a past
which is lost in the dimness of legend. More
than all, however, the last record which marks
the place in the pages of history brings to
mind a deed of desecration and of blood per
petrated in the evil, days which brought ruin

Glastonbury. 3
to the most famous sanctuary on English soil,
for here suffered for conscience sake Richard
Whiting, last abbot of the far-famed abbey of
Glastonbury which nestled at its foot, thus
making a worthy close to a history without
parallel in the annals of our country.
The history of Glastonbury is the history of
its abbey ; without its abbey Glastonbury were
nothing.1 Even among those great ecclesias
tical institutions, the Benedictine abbeys of
mediaeval England, the history of Glastonbury
has a character all its own. I will not insult its
venerable age, says a recent historian, by so
much as contrasting it with the foundations of
yesterday which arose under the influence of
the Cistercian movement, for they play but a
small part indeed in the history of this church
and realm. Glastonbury is something more
than Netley and Tintern, Rievaux and Foun
tains. It is something more again than the
Benedictine houses which arose at the bidding
of the Norman Conqueror, of his race and of
his companions ; more than Selby and Battle,
1 The following is adapted from the late Professor Freeman.

4 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
and Shrewsbury and Reading. It is in its own
special aspect something more even than the
royal minster of St. Peter, the crowning place
of Harold and of William, which came to sup
plant Glastonbury as the burial place of kings.
Nay, it stands out distinct even among the
great and venerable foundations of English
birth which were already great and venerable
when this country fell into the hands of the
Norman. There is something in Glastonbury
which one looks for in vain at Peterborough
and Crowland and Evesham, or even at Win
chester and Canterbury; all these are the works
of our own, our English people ; they go back
to the days of our ancient kingship, they go
back — some of them — even to the days when
Augustine preached, and Theodore fixed the
organisation of the growing English Church ;
but they go back no further. We know their
beginnings, we know their founders ; their his
tory, nay, their very legends do not dare to
trace up their foundations beyond the time
of the coming of Saxon and Angle into this
island. At Glastonbury, and at Glastonbury
alone, we instinctively feel that the name of

Glastonbury. 5
England is not, all, for here, and here alone,
we walk with easy steps, with no thought of
any impassable barrier, from the realm of Saxon
Ina back to that of Arthur, the hero king of
the British race. Alongside of the memory
and the tombs of the West-Saxon princes, who
broke the power of the Northmen, there still
abides the memory of the British prince who
checked for a generation the advance of the
Saxon. But at Glastonbury even this is a small
matter. The legends of the spot go back to
the very days ofthe Apostles. Here, and here
alone on English soil, we are linked, not only
to the beginnings of English Christianity, but
to the beginnings of Christianity itself. We
are met at the outset by the tradition that the
spot was made sacred as the dwelling of a
multitude of the just, and its soil hallowed by
the bodies of numerous saints, "whose souls
now rejoice," says an ancient writer, "in the
possession of God in heaven." For here were
believed to have found a resting place the
twelve disciples of Philip the Apostle, sent by
him to Britain, under the leadership of Joseph

6 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
of Arimathea, who had buried our Lord.
"We know not," continues our author in his
simple style, "whether they really repose here,

Exterior of the chapel of St. Mary (commonly called
St. Joseph's), covering the site of the old British church,
and forming the atrium of the monastic church.
although we have read that they sojourned in
the place for nine years ; but here dwelt as
suredly many of their disciples, ever twelve in
number, who in imitation of them led a hermit's

Glastonbury. J
life until unto them came St. Patrick, the great
Apostle of the Irish and first abbot of the
hallowed spot. Here, too, rests St. Benen, the
disciple of St. Patrick ; here St. Gildas, the
historian of the British ; here St. David, bishop
of Menevia, and here the holy hermit Indractus
with his seven companions, all sprung from the
royal race. Here rest the relics of a band of
holy Irish pilgrims, who returning from a visit
to the shrines of Rome, turned aside to Glaston
bury out of love to St. Patrick's memory and
were martyred in a village named Shapwick.
Hither, not long after, their remains were
brought by Ina, our glorious king."
Such stories of the mediaeval scribe, however
little worthy of credit in point of detail, re
present, there can be little doubt, a substantial
truth. For as in later centuries there were
brought hither even from far distant Northum-
bria the relics of Paulinus, and Aidan and
Ceolfrid, of Boisil, of Benet Biscop and of
others for security on the advance of the
Danes, so too in earlier dangers there were
carried to Glastonbury, to save them from the
blind fury of the pagan Saxon, all that was

8 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
most sacred and venerated in the churches of
Christian Britain.
"No fiction, no dream could have dared,"
writes the historian, " to set down the names
of so many worthies of the earlier races of the
British Islands in the Liber Vitce of Durham
or of Peterborough. Now I do not ask you
to believe these legends ; I do ask you to
believe that there was some special cause why
legends of this kind should grow in such a
shape, and in such abundance round Glaston
bury alone of all the great monastic churches
of Britain."
Though these Glastonbury legends need not
be believed as the record of facts, still it has
been well said that " the very existence of
those legends is a very great fact. " The simple
truth is that the remoteness and isolation of
Glastonbury preserved it from attack, until
Christianity had won its way among the West
Saxons. So that when at last the Teutonic
conqueror came to Avalon, he had already
bowed his head to the cross and been washed
in the waters of Christian baptism. His coming
was thus not to destroy, but to give renewed

Glastonbury. 9
life to the already ancient monastic sanctuary.
The sacred precincts, hitherto held by Britons
only, now received monks of English race some
time before King Ina, its new founder, follow
ing the example of his father, Caedwalla, after a
reign of seven and thirty years, resigned his
crown, to journey to Rome, desiring to end his
pilgrimage on earth in the near neighbourhood
of the holy places, so that he might the more
readily be received by the saints themselves
into the celestial kingdom.
And when later the Danes overwhelmed
the land, it was this hallowed spot that was
destined to be the .centre from which not
merely a vigorous monastic revival spread
throughout England, but whence the king
dom itself was raised by a great reformer to
a new pitch of secular greatness ; for it was
here that Dunstan as a boy, brought by his
father on a pilgrimage to the churches of St.
Mary and St. Peter the Apostle, " built of olden
time," passed the night in prayer. Overcome
by sleep the boy saw in a dream an aged man,
clothed in snowy vesture, leading him, not
through the simple chapels and half - ruined

io The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
buildings which then occupied the site, but
through the fair alleys of a spacious church
and comely claustral buildings, whilst he told
him that thus was Glastonbury to be rebuilt by
him, and that he was to be its future head.
This, though but a dream, was yet a dream
which must have been related by Dunstan him
self in after years. The young day-dreams of
a strong nature have a tendency to realise
themselves in later life, and this boyish vision
of a renovated Glastonbury, the outward sign of
a new monastic spirit, manifests the workings
of a mind influenced, but prepared to be in
fluenced, by the past memories and the present
decay of the holy place. Nor did these early
images pass away in view of the brilliant pros
pects that opened out before the young cleric,
who had all the advantages of personal capacity
and powerful connections, and so he betook
himself to remote and solitary Glastonbury, to
work out the realisation of his monastic ideals,
Dunstan built up its walls with the essentially
practical end of securing the primary require
ments of monastic enclosure, and the buildings
were just like those he dreamed of in his boy-

Face f>. io.
Interior View of the chapel of St. Mary, showing the ruins
of the choir through the west door of the abbey church.

y Glastonbury. n
hood. He threw on his brother Wulfric the
entire temporal business and management of
the estates, so that he, freed from the encum
brance of all external affairs, might build up the
souls of those who had committed themselves

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Norman Doorway of St. Maky's chapel.
to his direction. It was here at Glastonbury,
under the care of St. Dunstan, that St. Ethel-
wold was formed and fashioned to be the chief
instrument in carrying out his monastic policy.
Here, too, St. Elphege the martyr, and a sue-

£2 The last Abbot of Glastonbury. 4
cessor of Dunstan on the throne of Canterbury
lived his monastic life. And from Avalon, too,
about the same time, went forth the monk Sig-
frid, as the evangelist of pagan Norway.
With such a history, such legends of the past
and such a renewal as the firm and lofty spirit
of Dunstan effected in its refoundation, it is
no wonder that the repute of Glastonbury
drew to it a crowd of fervent monks and
the ample benefactions of devout and faithful
friends, so that from henceforward there was
no monastic house in England which for splen
dour or wealth could compare with this ancient
sanctuary. Through the later Middle Ages,
to the people of England Glastonbury was
a Roma secunda. Strangers came from afar
to visit the holy ground, and pilgrim rests
marked the roads which led to it. Foreigners
coming in ships which brought their freight
to the great port of Bristol, hardly ever failed
to turn aside to visit this home of the saints,
whilst memorials of the sanctuary were carried
by the Bristol merchants into foreign lands.
Even now, as it lies in ruin, the iriiagination
can conceive the wonder with which a stranger;

Glastonbury. 1 3
on reaching the summit of the hill, still known as
the Pilgrims Way, saw spread out before him
Glastonbury Abbey in all its vast extent, with
its towers and chapels, its broad courts and
cloisters, crowned with the mighty church, the
fitting shrine of the sacred relics and holy
memories which had brought him thither.

M

CHAPTER II.
Richard Whiting.
Never, perhaps, was Glastonbury in greater
glory than at the moment when Richard Whit
ing was elected to rule the house as abbot.
Richard Whiting was born probably in the
early years of the second half of the fifteenth
century. The civil war between the Houses of
York and Lancaster was then at its height, and
his boyhood must have been passed amid the
popular excitement of the Wars of the Roses
and the varied fortunes of King Edward IV.
It is not unimportant to bear this in mind, since
the personal experience in his youth of the
troubles and dangers of civil strife can hardly
have failed to impress their obvious lesson
strongly upon his mind, and to influence him
when the wilfulness of Henry brought the

Richard Whiting. 15
country to the very verge of civil war, with its
attendant miseries and horrors.
The abbot's family was west-country in its
origin and was connected distantly with that
of Bishop Stapeldon, of Exeter, the generous
founder of Exeter College, Oxford. Its prin
cipal member was possessed of considerable
estates in Devon and Somerset, but Richard
Whiting came of a younger branch of the
family, numbered among the tenant holders of
Glastonbury possessions in the fertile valley of
Wrington. The name is found in the annals
of other religious houses. About the time of
Richard Whiting's birth, for example, another
Richard, probably an uncle, was camerarius, or
chamberlain, in the monastery of Bath,1 an
office which in after years, at the time of his
election as abbot, the second Richard held in
the Abbey of Glastonbury. Many years later,
at the beginning of the troubles which in
volved the religious houses in the reign of
Henry VIII., a Jane Whiting, daughter of
John, probably a near relative of the Abbot
1 Reg. Beckington f. 311.

\/

1.6 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
of Glastonbury "was shorn and had taken
the habit as a nun in the convent of Wilton;"1
whilst later still, when new foundations of Eng
lish religious life were being laid in foreign
countries, two of Abbot Whiting's nieces
became postulants for the veil in the English
Franciscan house at Bruges.2
Nothing is known for certain about the child
hood and youth of Richard Whiting ; but it
may be safely conjectured that he received his
early education and training within the walls of
his future monastic home. The antiquary
Hearne says that " the monks of Glastonbury
kept a free school, where poor men's sons were
bred up as well as gentlemen's and were fitted
for the universities."3 And some curious legal
proceedings, which involved an enquiry as to
the Carthusian martyr, blessed Richard Bere,
reveal the fact that as a boy he had been

1 R. O. Chanc, Ing. post mortem.
2 Oliver, Collections illustrating the History of the Catholic
Religion, p. 135. This house returned to England on the French
Revolution, and the high esteem with which it was regarded by
English Catholics, persecuted at home or exiles abroad, still
attends this venerable community, now established at Taunton.
3 History of Glastonbury, preface.

Richard Whiting. 17
"brought up at the charges of his uncle,"
Abbot Bere, in the Glastonbury school. The
pleadings show, that Richard Bere was probably
the son of one of the tenants of the abbey
lands, and among those who testify to the fact
of his having been a boy in the school were
"Nicholas Roe, of Glastonbury, gent," and
"John Fox, of Glastonbury, yeoman," both of
whom had been his fellow scholars " in the said
abbey together,"1 and Thomas Penny, formerly
Abbot Bere's servant, who spoke to the nephew
Richard as having been in the school at the
monastery, whence as he remembered he after
wards proceeded to Oxford. ' What is thus
known, almost by accident, about the early
education of the martyred Carthusian, may
with fair certainty be inferred in the case of
Richard Whiting. The boy's training in the
claustral school was succeeded by the disci
pline of the monastic novitiate : and it was t
doubtless in early youth, as was then the cus
tom, that he joined the community of the great
Benedictine monastery of the west country.
1 Downside Keviezu, vol. ix. (1890), p. 162.

1 8 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
Glastonbury, with its long, unbroken history,
had had its days of prosperity and its days of
trouble, its periods of laxity and days of re
covery, and when Whiting first took the mo
nastic habit report did not speak too well of
the state of the establishment. John Selwood,
the abbot, had held the office since 1457, and
under his rule, owing, probably in some measure
at least, to the demoralising influence of the
constant civil commotions, discipline grew slack
and the good name of the abbey had suffered.
But it would seem that, as is so often the case,
rumour with its many tongues had exaggerated
the disorders, since after a careful examination
carried out under Bishop Stillington's orders
by four ecclesiastics unconnected with the
diocese, no stringent injunctions were ap
parently imposed, and Abbot Selwood con
tinued to rule the house for another twenty
years. From Glastonbury Whiting was sent to
Cambridge,1 to complete his education, and his

1 Probably to " Monks' College. ' Speed, speaking of Mag
dalen College, Cambridge, says it " was first an hall inhabited
by monks of divers monasteries, and therefore heretofore

Richard Whiting. ig
name appears amongst those who took their
M.A. degree in 1483.1 About the same time the
register of the university records the well-
known names of Richard Reynolds, the Bridget-
tine priest of Sion, of John Houghton and
William Exmew, both Carthusians, and all
three afterwards noble martyrs in the cause of
Catholic unity, for which Whiting was also later
called upon to sacrifice his life. The blessed
John Fisher also, although no longer a student,
still remained in close connection with the uni
versity, when Richard Whiting came up from
Glastonbury to Cambridge.
After taking his degree the young Benedic
tine monk returned to his monastery, and there
probably would have been occupied in teaching.
For this work his previous training and his

called Monks' College, sent hither from their abbies to the
universitie to studye. Edward Stafford, last Duke of Bucking
ham, &c, bestowed much cost in the repair of it, and in 15 19
.... new built the hall, whereupon for a time it was called
Buckingham College ; but the Duke being shortly after attainted,
the buildings were left imperfect, continuing a place for monks
to study in, until the general suppression of monasteries by
King Henry VIII."— Speed, History of Great Britain, 1632,
p. 1053.
1 Cooper, Athena Cantabrigienses, p. 71.

20 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
stay at the university in preparation for his
degree in Arts, would have specially qualified
him, and in all probability he was thus engaged
till his ordination to the priesthood, some
fifteen years later. During this period one or
two events of importance to the monks of the
abbey may be briefly noted.
In 1493, John Selwood, who had been abbot
for thirty-six years, died. The monks having
obtained the King's leave to proceed with the
election of a successor,1 met for the purpose, and
made their choice, without apparently having
previously obtained the usual approval of the
bishop of the diocese. This neglect was caused
possibly by their ignorance of the forms of
procedure, as so long a time had intervened
since the last election. It may be also that in
the long continued absence of the Bishop of
Bath and Wells from his See they overlooked
this form. Be this as it may, Bishop Fox, then
the occupant of the See, on hearing of the elec
tion of John Wasyn without his approval,
applied to the king for permission to cancel the
1 Pat. Rot. 8 Henry VII., p. 2, m. 11.

Richard Whiting. 21

_> ¦

election. This having been granted, he success
fully claimed the right to nominate to the office,
and on 20th January, 1494, by his commissary,
Dr. Richard Nicke, Canon of Wells, and after
wards Bishop of Norwich, he installed Richard
Bere in the abbatial chair of Glastonbury.1
In the fourth year of this abbot's rule, Somer
set and the neighbourhood of Glastonbury was
disturbed by the passage of armed men — in
surgents against the authority of King Henry
VII. and the royal troops sertt against them —
which must have sadly broken in upon the quiet
of the monastic life. In the early summer of
1497 the Cornish rebels who had risen in re
sistance to the heavy taxation of Henry, passed
through Glastonbury and Wells on their way
to London. Their number was estimated at
from six to fifteen thousand, and the country
for miles around was at night lighted up by
their camp fires. Their poverty was dire, their
need most urgent, and although it is recorded
that no act of violence or pillage was perpe-

1 Reg. Fox Bath et Wellen, f. 48. Pat. Rot., 9 Henry VII.
26.

22 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
trated by this undisciplined band, still their
support was a burden on the religious houses
and the people of the districts through which
they passed.
Hardly had this rising been suppressed than
Somerset was again involved in civil commo
tions. Early in the autumn of 1497 Perkin
Warbeck assembled his rabble forces — " how-
beit, they were poor and naked "1 — round
Taunton, and on the 21st September the ad
vanced guard of the king's army arrived at
Glastonbury, and was sheltered in the monas
tery and its dependencies. The same night
the adventurer fled to sanctuary, leaving his
8,000 followers to their own devices ; and on
the 29th of this same month Henry himself
reached Bath and moved forward at once to
join his other forces at Wells and Glastonbury.
With him came Bishop Oliver King, who,
although he had held the See of Bath and
Wells for three years, had never yet visited his
cathedral city, and who now hurried on before
his royal master to be enthroned as bishop a
1 B. Mus. Cott. MS. Vit. A. xvi., f. 166b.

Richard Whitinz.

_> ¦

few hours before he in that capacity took part
in the reception of the king. Henry had with
him some 30,000 men, when on St. Jerome's
day he entered Wells, and took up his lodgings
with Dr. Cunthorpe in the deanery.1 The
following day, Sunday, October 1, was spent
at Wells, where the king attended in the Cathe
dral at a solemn Te De7im in thanksgiving for
his bloodless victory. Early on the Monday
he passed on to Glastonbury, and was lodged
by Abbot Bere within the precincts of the
monastery. The abbey was then at the height of its
glory, for Bere was in every way fitted for the
position to which the choice of Fox had elevated
him. A witness in the trial spoken of above
describes Abbot Bere as " a grave, wise and
discreet man, just and upright in all his ways,
and for so accounted of almost all sorts of
people." Another deposes that he "was good,
honest, virtuous, wise and discreet, as well as
a grave man, and for those virtues esteemed in
as great reputation as few of his coat and calling
1 Historical MSS. Report, i. p. 107.

24 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
in England at that time were better accounted
of."1 On the interior discipline and the exterior
administration of his house alike he bestowed a
watchful care, and under his prudent adminis
tration the monastic buildings and church
received many useful and costly additions. At
great expense he built the suite of rooms after
wards known as "the King's lodgings," and
added more than one chapel to the time-
honoured sanctuary of Glastonbury. At the
west end of the town he built the Church of
St. Benen, now commonly known as St.
Benedict's, which bears in every portion of the
structure his rebus. His care for the poor was
manifested by the almshouses he established,
and the thought he bestowed on the prudent
ordering of the lowly spital of St. Margaret's,
Taunton. Beyond this, Bere was a learned
man, as well as a careful administrator, and
even Erasmus submitted to his judgment. In
a letter written a few years after this abbot's
death this great scholar records how he had
long known the reputation of the Abbot of
1 Downside Review, ut sup., p. 160.

Richard Whiting. 25
Glastonbury. His bosom friend, Richard Pace,
the well-known ambassador of Wolsey in
many difficult negotiations, had told him how
to Bere's liberality he owed his education and his
success in life to the abbot's judicious guidance.
For this reason, Erasmus, who had made a
translation of the sacred Scriptures from the
Greek, which he thought showed a " more
polished style " than St. Jerome's version, sub
mitted his work to the judgment of the abbot.
Bere opposed the publication, and Erasmus
bowed to the abbot's opinion, which in after
years he acknowledged as correct.1 Henry the
Seventh, who ever delighted in the company
of learned men, must have been pleased with
the entertainment he received at Glastonbury,
where the whole cost was borne by the abbot.2
It is possible, by reason of the knowledge the
king then derived of the great abilities of Bere,
that six years afterwards, in 1503, he made
choice of him to carry the congratulations of

1 Ep. lib. xviii., 46 ; Warner, Glastonbury, p. 213.
2 The Wardrobe accounts show that while the king had to
pay somewhat heavily for his stay at Wells, his entertainment
at Glastonbury cost nothing.

26 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
England to Cardinal John Angelo de Medicis,
when he ascended the pontifical throne as Pius
IV.

Chapel in the north transept of the abbey church,
SHOWING THE TOWER OF St. John's CHURCH, GLASTONBURY.
The troubles of Somerset did not end with
the retirement of the royal troops. Though
the country did not rise in support of the
Cornish movement, it appears to have some-

Richard Whiting. 27
what sympathised with it, and at Wells Lord
Audley joined the insurgents as their leader.
For this sympathy Henry made them pay ;
and the rebels' line of march can be traced by
the record of the heavy fines levied upon those
who had been supposed to have "aided and
comforted " them. Sir Amyas Paulet — the
first Paulet of Hinton St. George — was one of
the commissioners sent to exact this pecuniary
punishment, and from his record it would
appear that nearly all in Somerset were fined.
The abbots of Ford and Cleeve, of Muchelney
and Athelney, with others, had extended their
charity to the starving insurgents, and Sir
Amyas made them pay somewhat smartly for
their pity. Somehow Glastonbury appears to
have escaped the general penalty ; probably
the abbot's entertainment of the king saved the
abbey, although some of the townsfolk did not
escape the fine.1 This severe treatment must
have had more than a passing effect. The
generation living at the time of the suppres
sion of the abbey could well remember the
1 R.O. Chapter House, Misc. Box, 152, No. 24. See also
Somerset Archaological Society, 1879, p. 70.

28 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
event. They knew well what was the meaning
of the heavy hand of a king, and had felt at
their own hearths what were the ravages of an
army. This may go far to explain how it
happened that in Somersetshire there was no
Pilgrimage of Grace.
Meantime Richard Whiting had witnessed
these troubles, which came so near home, from
the seclusion of the monastic enclosure in which
he had been preparing for the reception of
sacred orders. The Bishop of Bath and Wells,
Oliver King, had not remained in his diocese
after the public reception of Henry. He was
much engaged in the secular affairs of the
kingdom, and his episcopal functions were
relegated to the care of a suffragan, Thomas
Cornish, titular Bishop of Tinos, also at this
time Vicar of St. Cuthbert's, Wells, and
Chancellor of the Diocese. From the hands
of this prelate Dom Richard Whiting received
the minor order of acolyte in the month of
September, 1498. In the two succeeding years
he was made sub-deacon and deacon, and on
the 6th March, 1501, he was elevated to the

Richard Whiting-.

29

sacred order of the priesthood.1 The ordina
tion was held in Wells by Bishop Cornish in
the chapel of the Blessed Virgin, by the

Chapel in the south transept, Glastonbury Abbey.
cathedral cloisters — a chapel long since de
stroyed, and the foundations of which have
recently been discovered.

1 Reg. O. King, Bath et Wellen Ep.

30 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
For the next five and twenty years we know
very little about Richard Whiting. It is more
than probable that his life was passed entirely
in the seclusion of the cloister and in the exer
cise of the duties imposed upon him by obedi
ence. In 1505, the register of the University
of Cambridge shows that he returned there,
and took his final degree as Doctor in The
ology. In his monastery he held the office of
" Camerarius," or Chamberlain, which would
give him the care of the dormitory, lavatory,
and wardrobe of the community, and place him
over the numerous officials and servants neces
sary to this office in so important and vast an
establishment as Glastonbury then was.

31

CHAPTER III.
Richard Whiting elected Abbot.
In the month of February, 1525, Abbot
Bere died, after worthily presiding over the
monastery for more than thirty years. A few
days after his death, on the 1 1 th of February,
the monks in sacred orders, forty-seven in
number, met in the chapter house to elect a
successor. They were presided over by their
Prior, Dom Henry Coliner, and on his proposi
tion it was agreed that five days were to be
left for consideration and discussion, and the
final vote taken on the 16th. On that day,
after a solemn mass de Spiritu Sancto the
" great bell " of the monastery called the monks
into chapter. There the proceedings were
begun by the singing of the Veni Creator with
its versicle and prayer, and then Dom Robert
Clerk, the sacrist, read aloud the form of cita-

32 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
tion to all having a right to vote, followed by a
roll call of the names of the monks. The book
of the Holy Gospels was then carried round,
and each in succession laid his hand on the
sacred page, kissed it, and swore to make
choice of him whom in conscience he thought
most worthy. After this, one Mr. William
Benet, acting as the canonical adviser of the
community, read aloud the constitution of the
general council Quia propter, and carefully ex
plained the various methods of election to the
brethren. Then the religious with one mind
determined to proceed by the method called
" compromise " {per formam compromissi),
which placed the choice in the hands of some
individual of note, and unanimously named
Cardinal Wolsey to make choice of their abbot.
The following day the Prior wrote to the
Cardinal of York, begging him to accept the
charge. Having obtained the royal permission
and after having allowed a fortnight to go by
for inquiry and consideration, he, on March
3rd1 in his chapel at York Place, declared
1 Hearne, Adam de Domerham, App. xcvii.

Richard Whiting elected Abbot. 33
Richard Whiting the object of his choice.
The Cardinal's commission to acquaint the
brethren of his election was handed to a
deputation from the abbey consisting of Dom
John of Glastonbury, the cellarer, and Dom
John Benet, the sub-prior, and the document
spoke in the highest terms of Whiting. He
was described, for example, as "an upright and
religious monk, a provident and discreet man,
and a priest commendable for his life, virtues
and learning." He had shown himself, it
declared, "watchful and circumspect" in both
spirituals and temporals, and had proved that
he possessed ability and determination to
uphold the rights of his monastery.1 This
instrument, drawn up by a notary and signed by
the Cardinal and three witnesses, one of whom
was the blessed Thomas More, was handed to
the two Glastonbury monks, who returned at
once to their abbey.
They arrived there on the 8th of March, and
met the brethren in the chapter house, where
they declared the result of the Cardinal's
1 Hearne, Adam de Domerham, App. xcvii.

34 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
deliberations. Then, at once, Dom John of
Taunton, the precentor, intoned the Te
Deum, and they wended their way, chanting
the hymn, from the chapter to the church, lead
ing the newly elect. Meantime the news had
spread throughout the town. The people
thronged into the church to hear the proclama
tion, and as the procession of monks with
Richard Whiting came from the cloisters we
can well picture the scene. The nave of the
mighty church was occupied by " a vast multi
tude" eager to do honour to him who was hence
forth to be their temporal and spiritual lord
and father. The glorious sanctuary of Avalon,
enriched during ten centuries by the generous
gifts of pious benefactors, had received new
and costly adornments at the hands of the
abbot so lately gone to his reward. The vault
ing of the nave, which then rang with the
voices of the monks as they sang the hymn of
praise, was one of his latest works. The new-
made openings in the wall marked the places
where stood King Edgar's Chapel, and those
of Our Lady of Loretto, and the Sepulchre, more
fitting monuments than was the plain marble

Ruins of the choir ok Glastonbury abbey church, showing the west
doorway of the nave in the distance.

Facet. 35-

Richard Whiting elected Abbot. 35
slab that marked his grave, of his love and
veneration for the ancient sanctuary of Glaston.
And as the monks grouped themselves within
the choir, the eye, looking through the screen
which ran athwart the great chancel arch — the
porta coeli — would have seen the glitter of the
antependium of solid silver gilt studded with
jewels, with which the same generous hand had
adorned the high altar.
Into this noble sanctuary the people of
Glaston crowded on that March morning in the
year 1525 to hear what selection the great
Cardinal had made. And as the voices of the
monks died away with the last "Amen " to the
prayer of thanksgiving to God for mercies to
their House, a notary public, at the request
of the Prior and his brethren, turned to the
people, and from off the steps of the great altar
proclaimed in English the due election' of
Brother Richard Whiting. Then, as the
people streamed forth from the church bear
ing the news abroad, the monks returned to
chapter for the completion of the required
formalities. And first, the free consent of the
elect himself had to be obtained, and he as yet

36 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
remained unwilling to take up the burden of so
high an office. He had betaken himself to the
guest-house, called the "hostrye," and thither
Dom William Walter and Dom John Winch-
combe repaired, as deputed by the rest, to win
him to consent. At first he determined to
refuse, and then demanded time for thought
and prayer ; but a few hours after, " being," as
he declared, "unwilling any longer to offer
resistance to what appeared the will of God,"
he yielded to their solicitations and accepted
the dignity and burden.
Then on Richard Whiting's acceptance being
notified to the Cardinal, he sent two commis
sioners to conduct the required canonical in
vestigations into the fitness of the elect for the
office. On 25th March these officials arrived
at the monastery, and early on the morn
ing following, the Prior and monks came in
procession to the conventual church ; in the
presence of the Prior and convent they made a
general summons to all and any to communi
cate to them any facts or circumstances which
should debar Whiting from being confirmed as
abbot ; after this the like obligation was laid in

Richard Whiting elected Abbot. 37
chapter on the monks. Once more, at noon,
the decree was published to a "great multi
tude" in the church, and afterwards fixed against
the great doors.
Three days later, as no one had appeared to
object to the election, the procurator of the
Abbot, Dom John of Glastonbury, produced
his witnesses as to age and character.
Amongst them was Sir Amyas Paulet, of
Hinton St. George, who declared that he had
known the elect for eight-and-twenty years,
which was just the time when Henry VII. had
visited Glastonbury, and Sir Amyas had been
occupied in extracting from the people of
Somerset the fines levied for their real or
supposed sympathy with Perkin Warbeck and
his Cornish rebels. The abbot's witnesses
testified that he had always borne the highest
character, not only in Somerset, but elsewhere
beyond the limits of the diocese, and that
none had ever heard anything but good of him.
One who so testified was Dom Richard Beneall,
who had been a monk at Glastonbury for nine
teen years, and who declared that during all
those years Richard Whiting had been reputed
a man of exemplary piety.

38 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
When this lengthy and strict scrutiny was
finished the Cardinal's commissioners declared
the confirmation of the elect. Then, after the
usual oath of obedience to the Bishop of the
Diocese had been taken by the elect, he re
ceived the solemn blessing in his own great
abbey church from Dr. William Gilbert, Abbot
of Bruton and Bishop of Mayo in Ireland, at
that time acting as suffragan to the Bishop of
Bath and Wells.1
In the pages of ecclesiastical history Wolsey's
name meets with scant favour. Writers of
all parties, whether they look on him with
friendly or unfriendly eye, have little to say
of his devotion to the best interests of the
Church. Whatever his defects, due credit has
not been given him for the real and enlightened
care which he bestowed on the true welfare of
the religious orders. For the Benedictines
and Augustinians he designed, and in part
carried out, measures of renovation, the fruits
of which were already visible when Henry
suppressed the monastic houses. It is evident
1 The account here given is from the official document in the
Register of Bishop Clerke.

Richard Whiting elected Abbot. 39
that he was not content with general measures,
but he fully acquainted himself with details and
with persons. The election of Abbot Whiting
is a case in point, and it is by no means im
probable that the keen eye of the ecclesiastical
statesman had marked him out at the general
chapter of the Benedictines at Westminster,
over which the great Cardinal had himself
presided. Thus was inaugurated the rule of the last
abbot of Glastonbury, amid the applause and
goodwill of all who knew him. Hitherto his
life had been passed, as the life of a monk should
be, in seclusion and unknown to the world at
large. He had clearly not been one to seek for
power or expect preferment, and his election to
the abbacy of Glastonbury, though causing his
name and fame to be spread wider, would after
all, in the ordinary course of events, have given
him in the main a local repute, and one of its
nature destined, after life's day well spent in
the peaceful government of his monastery, to
pass into oblivion. Of course his position as
head of one of the greatest of the Parliamen
tary abbeys (if the term may be used) obtained

40 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
for him, a place, and that no undistinguished
one, in the roll of peers and in the House of
Lords ; and thus he would be brought naturally
every year to the Court and the great delibera
tive assembly of the realm. But this was not
a sphere which attracted a man of Whiting's
temper and simple-minded religious spirit.
His place was more fittingly found within his
house, and in the neighbourhood which fell
within the direct range of his special and
highest duties. Here, then, he might have
been best known and loved ; and no further.
But another lot was, marked out for him in the
designs of God. His life was to end in the
winning of a favour greater than any which
could be bestowed by an earthly power, for
the crown of martyrdom was to be the reward
of his devotion to daily duty. His fidelity to
his state and trust issued in a final act of
allegiance to Holy Church and to her earthly
head which causes his name to be known and
revered through all lands.

4i

CHAPTER IV.
Troubles in Church and State.
The rule of Abbot Whiting over the vast
establishment of Glastonbury had to be ex
ercised in difficult times. Within a few
months of his election Sir Thomas Boleyn was
created Viscount Rochford, and this marked
the first step in the king's illicit affection for
the new peer's daughter, Anne, and the begin
ning of troubles in Church and State. For
years of wavering counsels on the great matter
of Henry's desired divorce from Katherine led
in 1529 to the humiliation and fall of the
hitherto all-powerful Cardinal of York.
Circumstances combined at this time to
gather together in the social atmosphere
elements fraught with grave danger to the
Church in England. The long and deadly feud
between the two " Roses " had swept away the
pride and flower of the old families of England.

42 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
The stability which the traditions and prudent
counsels of an ancient nobility give the ship of
State, was gone when it was most needed to
enable it to weather the storm of revolutionary
ideas. Most of the new peers created in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to take the
place of the old nobles had little sympathy,
either by birth or inclination, with the traditions
of the past. Many were mere place-hunters,
•political adventurers, ready if not eager to
profit by any disturbance of the social order.
Self-interest prompted them to range them
selves in the restless ranks of the party of,
innovation. Those who have nothing to lose
are proverbially on the side of disorder and
change. The " official," too, the special crea
tion of the Tudor monarchs, was by nature un
settled and discontented, ever on the look-out
for some lucky chance of supplementing an
inadequate pay. Success in life depended, for
men of this kind, on their attracting to them
selves the notice of their royal master, which
prompted them to compete one with the other
in fulfilling his wishes and satisfying his whims.1
1 See Friedmann, Anne Boleyn, i., p. 27, seqq.

Troubles in Church and State. 43
At the head of all was Henry VIII., a king
of unbridled desires, and one whose only code
of right and wrong was founded, at least in the
second half of his reign, on considerations of
power to accomplish what he wished. What
he could do was the measure of what he might
lawfully attempt. Sir Thomas More, after he
had himself retired from office, in his warning
to the rising Crumwell, rightly gauged the
king's character. " Mark, Crumwell," he said,
" you are now entered the service of a most
noble, wise and liberal prince ; if you will follow
my poor advice, you shall in your counsel
given to His Grace, ever tell him what he
ought to do, but not what he is able to do. For
if a lion but knew his own strength, hard were it
for any man to rule him."
Nor, unfortunately, were the clergy of the
time generally fitted to cope with the forces of
revolution, or hold back the rising tide of
novelties. In the days when might was right
and the force of arms the ruling power of the
world, the occupation of peace, to which the
clergy were bound, excited opposition from the
party who saw their opportunity in a distur-

44 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
bance of the existing order. The bishops
were, with some honourable exceptions, chosen
by royal favour rather than for a spiritual
qualification. However personally good they
may have been, they were not ideal pastors of
their flocks. Place-seeking, too, often kept
many of the lords spiritual at court, that they
might gain or maintain influence sufficient to
support their claims to further preferment.
The occupation of bishops over much in the
affairs of the nation, besides its evident effect
on the state of clerical discipline, had another
result. It created in the minds of the new
nobility a jealous opposition to, ecclesiastics and
a readiness to humble the power of the Church
by passing measures in restraint of its ancient
liberties. The lay lords and hungry officials
not unnaturally looked upon this employment
of clerics in the intrigues of party politics and
in the wiles and crafty business of foreign
and domestic diplomacy as trenching upon
their domain and as thus keeping them out of
coveted preferment. Consequently, when occa
sion offered, no great difficulty was experienced
in inducing them to turn against the clergy

Troubles in Church and State. 45
and thus enable Henry to carry out his policy
of coercive legislation in their regard.
Five years after Abbot Whiting's election
to rule over Glastonbury the fall of Cardinal
Wolsey opened the way for the advancement
of Thomas Crumwell, who may be regarded as
the chief political contriver of the change of
religion in England. On the fall of the old
order he built up his own fortune. For ten
years England groaned beneath his rule — in
truth it was a reign of terror unparalleled in
the history of the country. To power he
mounted and in power he was maintained by
showing -himself subservient to every whim
of a monarch, the strength of whose passions
was only equalled by the remorselessness and
tenacity with which he pursued his aims.
Crumwell fully understood before entering on
his new service what its conditions were, and
neither will nor ability was lacking to their
fulfilment. Under his management, at once
skilful and unscrupulous, Henry mastered the
Parliament and paralysed the action of Con
vocation, moulding them according to his royal
will and pleasure.

46 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
Having determined that the great matter of
his divorce from Katherine should be settled
in his own favour, he conceived the ex
pedient of throwing off the ecclesiastical
authority of the pope over the nation and
constituting himself supreme head of the
Church of England. Though the clergy
struggled for a time against the royal de
termination, in the end they gave way ; and on
November 3rd, 1534, the "Act of Supremacy "
was hurried through Parliament, and a second
statute made it treason to deny this new royal
prerogative. The sequel is well known. The clergy
caught in the cunningly-contrived snare of
premunire, and betrayed by Cranmer, who, as
Archbishop of Canterbury, had inherited War-
ham's office, but not his spirit, were at the
king's mercy. With his hands upon their
throats Henry demanded, what in the quarrel
with Rome was at the time a retaliation upon
the pope for his refusal to accede to the royal
wishes, the acknowledgment of the king as
supreme head of the Church of England.
Few among English churchmen were found

Troubles in Church and State. 47
bold enough to resist this direct demand, or
who even, perhaps, recognised how they were
rejecting papal supremacy in matters spiritual.
As a rule, the required oath of royal supremacy
was apparently taken wherever it was tendered,
and the abbots and monks of Colchester, of
Glastonbury, and probably also of Reading,
were no exception, and on September 19th,
1534, Abbot Whiting and his community, fifty-
one in number, attached their names to the
required declaration.1
It is easy, after this lapse of time, and in the
light of subsequent events, to pass censure on
such compliance ; to wonder how throughout
England the blessed John Fisher and Thomas
More, and the Observants, almost alone, should
have been found from the beginning neither to
hesitate nor waver. It is easy to make light of
the shrinking of flesh and blood, easy to extol
the palm of martyrdom. But it is not difficult,
too, to see how reasons suggested themselves
' Deputy Keeper's Report, vii., p. 287. Mr. Devon, who drew
up the list, says : " The signatures, in my opinion, are not all
autographs, but frequently in the same handwriting ; and my
impression is, that the writer of the deed often added many
names."

48 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
at least for temporising. To most men at that
date the possibility of a final separation from
Rome must have seemed incredible. They
remembered Henry in his earlier years, when
he was never so immersed in business or in
pleasure that he did not hear three or even five
masses a day ; they did not know him as
Wolsey or Crumwell, or as More or Fisher
knew him ; the project seemed a momentary
aberration, under the influence of evil passion
or evil counsellors, and it was on the king's part
" but usurpation desiderated by flattery and
adulation;" these counsellors removed, all would
be well again. Henry had at bottom a zeal
for the faith and would return by-and-bye to
a better mind, a truer self, and would then
come to terms with the pope. The idea of the
headship was not absolutely new : it had in a
measure been conceded some years before,
without, so far as appears, exciting remon
strance from Rome. Beyond this, to many
the 'oath of royal supremacy of the Church of
England was never understood as derogatory
to the see of Rome. While even those who
had taken this oath were in many instances

Troubles in Church and State. 49
surprised that it should be construed into any
such hostility.1
However strained this temper of mind may
appear to us at this time, it undoubtedly
existed. One example may be here -cited.
Among the State Papers in the Record Office
for the year 1539 is a long harangue on the
execution of the three Benedictine abbots, in
which the writer refers to such a view : — ¦
I cannot think the contrary [he writes], but the old
bishop of London [Stokesley], when he was on live,
used the pretty medicine that his fellow, friar Forest,
was wont to use, and to work with an inward man and
an outward man ; that is to say, to speak one thing
with their mouth and then another thing with their
heart. Surely a very pretty medicine for popish hearts.
But it worked madly for some of their parts. Gentle
Hugh Cook [the abbot of Reading] by his own con
fession used not the self-same medicine that friar Forest
used, but another much like unto it, which was this :
what time as the spiritualty were sworn to take the
king's grace for the supreme head, immediately next
under God of this Church of England, Hugh Cook
receiving the same oath added prettily in his own

1 Calendar, viii., Nos. 277, 387, &c, are instances of the
temper of mind described above. No. 387 especially is very
significant as showing the gloss men put on the supremacy
oath, distinguishing tacitly between Church of England and
Catholic Church, and "in temporalibus,'' and "in spiritualibus."
4'

50 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
conscience these words following: "of the temporal
church," saith he, " but not of the spiritual church." 1
Nor from another point of view is this want
of appreciation as to the true foundation of the
papal primacy a subject for unmixed astonish
ment. During the last half-century the popes
had reigned in a court of unexampled splendour,
but a splendour essentially mundane. It was
a dazzling sight, but all this outward show
made it difficult to recognise the divinely
ordered spiritual prerogatives which are the
enduring heritage of the successors of St.
Peter. The words of Cardinal Manning on this
point may be here quoted : — " It must not be
forgotten that at this time the minds of men
had been so distracted by the great western
schism, by the frequent subtraction of obedi
ence, by the doubtful election of popes, and the
simultaneous existence of two or even three
claimants to the holy see, that the supreme
pontifical authority had become a matter of
academical discussion hine inde. Nothing- but
O
1 R. O. State Papers, Dom., 1539, No. 207, p. 23.

Troubles in Church and State. 51
such preludes could have instigated even Ger-
son to write on the thesis de auferabilitate
Papa. This throws much light on the singular
fact attested by Sir Thomas More in speaking
to the jury and the judge by whom he was
condemned, when the verdict of death was
brought in against him : ' I have, by the grace
of God, been always a Catholic, never out of
communion with the Roman Pontiff; but I
have heard it said at times that the authority
of the Roman Pontiff was certainly lawful and
to be respected, but still an authority derived
from human law, and not standing upon a
divine prescription. Then, wrhen I observed
that public affairs were so ordered that the
sources of the power of the Roman Pontiff
would necessarily be examined, I gave myself
up to a most diligent examination of that
question for the space of seven years, and
found that the authority of the Roman Pontiff,
which you rashly — I will not use stronger lan-
o-uasre — have set aside, is not only lawful, to
be respected, and necessary, but also grounded
on the divine law and prescription. That is

52 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
my opinion ; that is the belief in which by the
grace of God, I shall die.' " 1
The lofty terms expressive of papal preroga
tives might pass unquestioned in the schools
and in common speech in the world, but from
this there is a wide step to the apprehension,
then none too common, of the living truths
they express, and a yet further step to that
intense personal realization which makes those
truths dearer to a man than life.
To some, in Whiting's day, that realization
came sooner, to some later. Some men, a few,
seized at once the point at issue and its full
import, and were ready with their answer with
out seeking or faltering. Others answered to
the call at the third, or even the eleventh hour ;
the cause was the same, and so were the fate
and the reward, though to the late comer the
respite may perhaps have been only a prolonga
tion of the agony.
It is of course impossible here to attempt
even a sketch of the train of events which led
to the destruction of Glastonbury and Abbot
1 Dublin Review, January, 1888, p. 245.

Troubles in Church and State. 53
Whiting's martyrdom. The suppression of the
monasteries has been described as simply "an
enormous scheme for filling the royal purse."1
As his guilty passion for Anne Boleyn is the
key to half of the extraordinary acts of the
succeeding years of Henry's reign, so is the
need of money to gratify his other appetites
the key to the rest. From the seizure of the
first of the lesser religious houses to the fall of
Glastonbury, the greatest and most magnificent
of them all, gain was the one thought of the
king's heart. To this end every engine was
devised, conscience was trodden under foot and
blood was spilled.
With the evident design of obtaining a pre
text for falling on the religious houses, the
oath of supremacy in an amplified form was
tendered to their inmates.2 " There was pre
sented to them," writes a recent historian, " a

1 Dixon, History of the Church of England, i., p. 456. The
last Abbot of Colchester, John Beche alias Marshal, is reported
to Crumwell as saying : " The king and his council are drawn
into such an inordinate covetousness that if all the water in
the Thames were flowing gold and silver, it were not able to
slake their covetousness." (R. O. State Papers, 1539, No. 207.)
2 Ibid., p. 213.

54 The last Abbot of Gtastonbury.
far more severe and explicit form of oath than
that which More and Fisher had refused, than
that which the Houses of Parliament and the
secular clergy had consented to take. They
were required to swear, not only that the chaste
and holy marriage between Henry and Anne
was just and legitimate, and the succession
good in their offspring," but "also that they
would ever hold the king to be head of the
Church of England, that the Bishop of Rome,
who in his bulls usurped the name of Pope and
arrogated to himself the primacy of the most
High Pontiff, had no more authority and juris
diction- than other bishops of England or else
where in their dioceses, and that they would
for ever renounce the laws, decrees and canons
of the Bishop of Rome, if any of them should
be found contrary to the law of God and Holy
Scripture."1 This scheme failed, " for the oath
was taken in almost every chapter-house where
it was tendered."

1 Ibid., p. 211.

55

CHAPTER V.
Richard Whiting as Abbot of Glastonbury.
The first years of Abbot Whiting's rule
passed smoothly so far as the acts of his
administration and his life at Glastonbury were
concerned. He had of course to meet the
troubles and trials incidental to a position such
as was his. Moreover, for one who by his high
office was called on to take a part, in some
measure at least, in the great world of politics
and public life, it could not be but that his soul
must have been disturbed by anticipations of dif
ficulties, even of dangers, in the not very distant
future. Still, his own home was so far removed
from the turmoils of the court and the ominous
rumblings of the coming storm that he was
able to rule it in peace. Discipline well main
tained, a prudent and successful administration

56 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
of temporals and kindly relations with his neigh
bours, high and low, were certain evidences that
the government of Abbot Richard Whiting was
happy and prosperous. Under such circum
stances the position which he occupied as a
peer of Parliament and as master of great
estates was one which, as the world might
say, even from its point of view, was eminently
enviable. If is somewhat difficult in these days to form
a just and adequate idea of the place held in
the country by one who filled the abbatial chair
of Glastonbury. For wealth and considera
tion, though not indeed for precedence, it may
not unjustly be described as the most desirable
ecclesiastical preferment in England. The
revenues of the abbey exceeded those of the
archbishopric of Canterbury itself, whilst,
although the abbot had to maintain a large
community and a great household, still he was
exempt from the vast burdens necessarily en
tailed on so lofty a position as that of Primate
of England, who was Legatus natusof the Holy
See and often a Cardinal. The annual value of
the endowments of Westminster was, it is true,

The pegged Grace Cup of Glastonbury Abbey, now in the
possession of Lord Arundell of Wardour.

Face i. 57-

Richard Whiting as Abbot. 57
slightly greater, but the ecclesiastical position of
an abbot of that royal monastery was singularly
diminished by the presence in his near neigh
bourhood of two such great churchmen as the
Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of
London, whilst in its worldly aspect West
minster was overshadowed by the splendour of
the regal court at its doors. Glastonbury in
the sixteenth century had no rival in its own
district ; the day was past when the aspiring
Church of Wells could raise pretensions on that
score. In the west country there was neither
prince nor prelate, certainly since the fall of the
Duke of Buckingham, to compare in position,
all considered, with the Abbot of Glastonbury.
But withal there existed in the court of the
abbot, for his household w:as regulated like that
of a court, a simplicity befitting the monastic
profession. His own house was large, its rooms
were stately, but it did not pretend to the
dimensions of a palace. He had a body of
gentry to wait upon him and grace the hospi
tality he was ready to show to visitors the
most distinguished and to the poorer classes
who thronged the monastic guest-hall. To

58

The last Abbot of Glastonbury.

the great gate of the abbey, every Wednesday
and Friday, the poor flocked for relief in their
necessities, and as many as five hundred

Ruins of the Abbot's Guest-Kitchen, erected in the
early part of the i4th century.

persons are said to have been entertained at
times at the abbot's table. Still, a combined
simplicity and stateliness characterised the
whole rule of Abbot Whiting, and it is no

Richard Whiting as Abbot. 59
wonder that, as we are told, during his abbacy
some three or four hundred youths of gentle
birth received their first training in the abbot's
quarters. It may be asked by some how in such a
position as this, surrounded by all the world
most ambitions, Abbot Whiting could still be
a monk. The position was not of his making ;
he found it. But that he should ever remain
a monk, that, as abbot, he should be a true
guardian of the souls committed to him, the
true father and pattern of his spiritual children,
that was by God's grace still in his power.
That he was all this, his very enemies have
testified, and the explanation is simple. Raised
to rule and command at an age when, as he
knew, the grave could not be far distant, he
was already a monk trained, disciplined, per
fected in outward habit and in the possession
of his soul by his long course of obedience.
Tradition, which is often so true in matters of
small moment, more than a century and a half
after his death, still pointed out among the
ruins of his house, in the abbot's simple
chamber, Abbot Whiting's bed. It was

60 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
"without tester or post, was boarded at bottom,
and had a board nailed shelving at the head."

A Glastonbury Chair, dating from the time of Abbot
Whiting, probably made by his fellow martyr John
Thorne (from the Engraving in Warner).
This bedstead, according to the tradition of
the place, was the same that Abbot Whiting

Richard Whiting as Abbot. 61
lay on, and " I was desired," writes the visitor
who describes it, " to observe it as a curio
sity." The existence of the tradition is proof

Abbot Whiting's Stamp on the binding of his Register now
Additional MS. 17,451 (somewhat enlarged).
at least of an abiding belief, on the spot, in
the simplicity of life of the last lord of that
glorious pile, the vast ruins of which were

62 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
evidence of the greatness of the monastery.
It was possible even for an Abbot of
Glastonbury to preserve the true spirit of
poverty, and this was the secret of that ex
cellent discipline which Dr. Layton to his
bitter disappointment found to exist at Glaston
bury. The abbot practised first what, as his
duty imposed, he required from those entrusted
to his care, that is, from his spiritual children,
the monks of his house.

Another Stamp on the same binding (also enlarged).
It was during these comparatively peaceful
and happy times that Leland, the antiquary, on
his journey through England in search of an
tiquities, and especially manuscripts, visited the
abbey. He was introduced to the library by
Abbot Whiting in person, " a man truly upright

Richard Whiting as Abbot. 6

o

and of spotless life and my sincere friend " as
he calls him.1 He was filled with amazement
at the treasures contained in the Glastonbury
library. " No sooner did I pass the threshold,"
he writes, "than I was struck with awe and
astonishment at the mere sight of so many re
mains of antiquity." He considered that the
library had scarce any equal in all England, and
spent some days in examining the shelves and
the many wonderful manuscripts he found
there. With the conclusion of Henry's divorce case
came the end of these peaceful years of Abbot
Whiting's rule. Now began the anxious days
which were to end for him in the death of the
traitor, so far at least as the king's power could
extend in death.
Within a year from the general oath-taking
throughout England, and its failure to bring
1 Hearne, History of Glastonbury, p. 67. ; cf Walcott's Eng
lish Minsters,\\., 129. Leland spoke of Abbot Whiting as "homo
sane candidissimus et amicus meus singularis," and " though,"
says Warner {History of Glastonbury, p. 219) "the too cautious
antiquary in after times passed his pen through this language
of praise and kindness, lest it should be offensive to his contem
poraries, yet happily for the abbot's fame the tribute is still
legible and will remain for ages a sufficient evidence of the
sacrifice of a guileless victim to the tyranny of a second Ahab."

64 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
about the hoped-for result, Crumwell, ever
fertile in expedients, had organised a general
visitation of religious houses. The instruments
he made choice of to conduct this scrutiny, and
the methods they employed, leave no doubt
that the real object was the destruction of the
monasteries under the cloak of reformation.
The injunctions are minute and exacting ; in
detail many were excellent ; as a whole, even
in the hands of persons sincerely desirous of
maintaining discipline and observance, they
were unworkable. In the hands of Crumwell's
agents they were, as they were designed to be,
intolerable. It was rightly calculated that
under the pretence of restoring discipline they
strike at the authority of religious superiors by
the encouragement given to a system of tale
bearing. By other provisions the monasteries
were, with show of zeal for religion, turned into
prisons and reduced, if it were possible, to such
abodes of misery and unhappiness as the unin
formed Protestant imagination pictures them to
be.1 The moral of this treatment is summed
1 Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries, i., chapter vii.,
"The Visitation of the Monasteries in 1535-6." Dixon, vol. i.,
P- 357-

Richard Whiting as Abbot. 65
up by John ap-Rice and Thomas Legh, two of
the royal visitors, in a letter to Crumwell :
By this ye may see [they write] that they [the re
ligious] shall not need to be put forth, but that they will
make instant suit themselves, so that their doing shall
be imputed to themselves and no other. Although I
reckon it well done that all were out, yet I think it were
best that at their own suits they might be dismissed to
avoid calumniation and envy,1 and, so compelling them to
observe these injunctions ye shall have them all to do shortly,
and the people shall know it the better that it cometh
upon their suit, if they be not discharged straight while
we be here, for then the people would say that we went
for nothing else, even though the truth were contrary.2
Armed with a commission to visit and
enforce the injunctions, Dr. Richard Layton,
the most foul-mouthed and foul-minded ribald
of them all, as his own letters testify, came to
Glastonbury on Saturday, August 21st, 1535.
From St. Augustine's, Bristol, whither he de
parted on the following Monday, he wrote to
Crumwell a letter showing that even he, chief
among a crew who "could ask unmoved such
questions as no other human being could have
1 He means invidia, i.e., public odium.
2 Gairdner, Calendar of Papers Foreign a7id Domestic, ix.
No. 708. See also Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries,
i., p. 257.
5

66 The last. Abbot of Glastonbury.
imagined or known how to put, who could
extract guilt from a stammer, a tremble or a
blush, or even from indignant silence as surely
as from open confession "x — even Layton re
tired baffled from Glastonbury under the
venerable Abbot Whiting's rule, though he
covered his defeat with impudence unabashed.
" At Bruton and Glastonbury," he explains,
"there is nothing notable ; the brethren be so
straight kept that they cannot offend : but fain
they would if they might, as they confess, and
so the fault is not with them."2
At this period it would seem that Richard
Layton also spoke to the king in praise of
Abbot Whiting. For this error of judgment,
when some time later Crumwell had assured
himself of the abbot's temoer, he was forced to

1 Dixon, i., p. 357.
2 Wright, The Suppression ofthe Monasteries, p. 59. Godwin,
the Protestant Bishop of Hereford, says that the monks, " follow
ing the example of the ancient fathers, lived apart from the
world religiously and in peace, eschewing worldly employments,
and wholly given to study and contemplation ; " and the editor
of Sander, writing when the memory of the life led at Glaston
bury was still fresh in men's minds, says that the religious were
noted for their maintenance of common life, choral observance
and enclosure.

Richard Whiting as Abbot. 67
sue for pardon from both king and minister.
" I must therefore," he writes, " now in this my
necessity most humbly beseech your lordship
to pardon me for that my folly then committed,
as ye have done many times before, and of
your goodness to instigate the king's highness
majesty, in the premises."1
Hardly had the royal inquisitor departed
than it was found at Glastonbury, as elsewhere,
that the injunctions were not merely im
practicable, but subversive of the first prin
ciples of religious discipline. Abbot Whiting,
like so many religious superiors at this time,
petitioned for some mitigation. Nicholas Fitz-
James,2 a neighbour, dispatched an earnest
letter to Crumwell in support of the abbot's
petition. " I have spoken," he writes, "with my Lord
Abbot of Glastonbury concerning such injunc
tions as were given him and his convent by
your deputy at the last visitation there.
1 R. O. Crumwell Correspondence, vol. xx., No. 14.
2 Probably a relative of Chief Justice Fitzjames, and
grandfather, of the first monk afterwards professed in the
English Benedictine monastery of St. Gregory's, Douai.

6S The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
To inform your mastership of the truth there
be certain officers — brothers of the house —
who have always been attendant on the abbot,
as his chaplain, steward, cellarer, and one or
two officers more, (who) if they should be
bound to the first two articles, it should much
disappoint the order of the house, which hath
long been full honourable. Wherefore, if it
may please your said good mastership to
license the abbot to dispense with the two first
articles, in my mind you will do a very good
deed, and I dare be surety he will dispense
with none but with such as shall be necessary.
. . . Other articles there are which they
think very straight, howbeit they will sue to
your good mastership for that at more leisure ;
and in the meantime I doubt not they will
keep as good religion as any house of that
order within this realm."1
A month after this letter of Nicholas Fitz-
James, Abbot Whiting himself ventured to
present a grievance of another kind, affecting
others than his community. The recent sus
pension by royal authority of the jurisdiction
1 Wright, Suppression of the Mo7iasteries, p. 64.

Richard Whiting as Abbot. 69
exercised by the abbey over the town of Glas
tonbury and its dependencies, had caused the
gravest inconveniences. There are many
"poor people," he writes, "who are waiting to
have their causes tried," and he adds that he
cannot believe that the king's pleasure has been
rightly stated in Doctor Layton's orders.1
What the result of this application may have
been does not appear, but it was clearly the
royal purpose to let inconveniences be felt, not
to remove them.
The proceedings taken in 1536 in regard to
the suppression of the lesser monasteries must
have filled the minds of men of Whiting's
stamp with deep anxiety, as revealing more and
more clearly the settled purpose of the king.
"All the wealth of the world would not be
enough to satisfy and content his ambition,"
writes Marillac, the French ambassador, to his
master, Francis I. To enrich himself he would
not hesitate to ruin all his subjects.2 The State
papers of the period bear ample witness to the
1 R.O. Crumwell Corr. xiii. f. 58.
2 Inventaire analytique. Correspondance politique de MM.
Castillionet Marillac, 1 537-1 542. Ed. J. Kaulek. No. 242.

70 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
justice of this sweeping statement.1 The mon
asteries which were yet allowed to stand were
drained of their resources . by ever-increasing
demands on the part of Henry and his crea
tures. Farm after farm, manor after manor
was yielded up in compliance with requests
that were in reality demands. Pensions in
ever-increasing numbers were charged on mon
astic lands at the asking of those whom it was
impossible to refuse.
Abbot Whiting was allowed no immunity
from this species of tyrannical oppression.
The abbey, for instance, had of their own free
will granted to blessed Sir Thomas More a
corrody or annuity. On his disgrace Crumwell
urged the king's "pleasure and commandment"
that this annuity should be transferred to him
self under the convent seal. For a friend
Crumwell asks (and for the king's vicegerent
to ask was to receive) "the advocation of our
parish church of Monketon, albeit that it was
the first time that ever such a grant was made."
A further request, for the living of Batcombe,
1 The volumes of Crumwell' s correspondence in the Record
Office contain abundant evidence.

Richard Whiting as Abbot. 7.1
.Whiting was unable to comply with, since
another of the king's creatures had been before
hand and secured the prize. In one instance
an office which Crumwell had already asked
for and obtained from the abbot, he a few
months after demands for his friend " Mr.
Maurice Berkeley ; " and because the place was
already gone, . he requests that the abbot will
in lieu thereof give the rents of " his farm
Autograph Signature of Abbot Whiting, from an original
LETTER IN THE RECORD OFFICE (" RlC ABBATT THEr").
at Northwood Park." Abbot Whiting took
an accurate view of the situation : " If you
request it, I must grant it," he says ; and
adds, " I trust your servant will be content
with the park itself, and ask no. more."
The extant letters of Abbot Whiting, for
the most part answers to such like applications
for offices or benefices in his gift, are marked
by a courteous consideration and a readiness to

72 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
comply up to the utmost limits of the possible.
It is, moreover, evident that he had an intimate
concern in all the details of the complex
administration of a monastery of such extent
and importance with its thousand interests, no
less than a determining personal influence on
the religious character of his community ; and
that public calls were never allowed to come
between him and the primary and immediate
duties of the abbot. He is most at home in
his own country, among his Somersetshire
neighbours, and in the "straight" charge of
his spiritual children. Confident too in the
affection with which he was regarded by the
population, he had no scruples, whatever may
have been his mind in subscribing to the Supre
macy declaration of 1534, in securing for his
monks and his townsfolk in his own abbey
church the preaching of a doctrine by no
means in accord with the royal theories and
wishes on the subject. Thus on a Sunday in
the middle of February, 1536, a friar called
John Brynstan, preaching in the abbatial
church at Glastonbury to the people of the
neighbourhood, said " he would be one of them

Richard Whiting as Abbot 73
that should convert the new fangles and new
men, otherwise he would die in the quarrel." 1
By chance a glimpse is afforded of the
popular feeling in the district by a letter ad
dressed to Crumwell by one of his agents,
always ready to spy upon their neighbours and
report them to their master, in the hopes of
gaining thereby the good graces of the all-
powerful minister. Thomas Clarke writes
that one John Tutton of Mere, next Glaston,
— now by the way safely lodged in gaol — had
used seditious words against the king and had
spoken great slander against Crumwell himself.
The. depositions forwarded with this letter
explain how Tutton had called one Poole a
heretic for working on St. Mark's day. Poole
had replied that so the king had ordered, and
upon this Tutton declared that they could not
be bound to keep the king's command " if- it
was nought, as this was," and he added that
" Lord Crumwell was a stark heretic." Nor did
he stop here, for he continued in this strain ;
" Marry, many things be done by the king's
1 Calendar, x., 318.

74 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
Council which I • reckon he knoweth little of,
but that by such means he hath gathered great
treasure together; I wot well; there is a sort
that ruleth the king of whom I trust to see a

.-- 5":i.-. ,, -. •
1 7V

y
f \.y
I

¦¦..' .
xr?i??jf ^iw
"*¦-.,_.
¦ ¦¦ i
Abbot Whiting's Watch and Private Seal, now in the Museum at
Glastonbury (from the engraving in Warner).
day when they shall have less authority than
they have."1
Knowing doubtless what would be the nature
1 Gairdner, Calendar, xi., No. 567.
Richard Whiting as Abbot. 75
of its business, Abbot Whiting, excusinghimself
on the plea of age and ill-health, did not attend
the parliament of 1539, which, so far as it could
do, sealed the fate of the monasteries as yet
unsuppressed. He awaited the end on his own
ground and in the midst of his own people.
He was still as solicitous about the smallest
details of his care as if the glorious abbey were
to last- in czvum. Thus an interesting account
of Abbot. Whiting at Glastonbury is given in an
official examination regarding some debt, held
a few years after the abbot's martyrdom. John
Watts, "late monk and chaplain to the abbot,"
said that John Lyte, the supposed debtor, had
paid the money " in manner and form following.
That is to say, he paid £\o of the said ,£40 to
the said abbot in the little parlour upon the
right hand within the great hall, the Friday
after New Year's Day before the said abbot
was attainted. The said payment was made
in gold" in presence of the witness and only
one other : " for it was immediately after the
said abbot had dined, so that the abbot's gentle
men and other servants were in the hall at
dinner." Also "upon St. Peter's day at. mid-

-76 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
summer, being a Sunday, in the garden of the
said abbot at Glastonbury, whilst high mass
was singing," the debtor " made payment " of
the rest. "And at that time the abbot asked
of the said master Lyte whether he would set
up the said abbot's arms in his new buildings
that he had made. And the said master Lyte
answered the said abbot that he would ; and so
at that time the said abbot gave unto the said
Mr. Lyte eight angels nobles. And at the
payment of the ,£30 there was in the garden at
that time the Lord Stourton. I suppose," con
tinues the witness, "that the said Lord Stourton
saw not the payment made to the abbot, for the
abbot got him into an arbour of bay in the said
garden and there received his money. And
very glad he was at that time that it was paid
in gold for the short .telling, as also he would
not, by his will, have it seen at that time."1
Thus too almost the last glimpse afforded of the

1 R. O. Exch. Augt. Off. Misc. Bk., xxii., Nos. 13-18. In
view of the circumstances of the time it seems likely that the
witness was anxious to ward off any possibility of Lord Stourton
being mixed up in the affair. This. anxiety to save friends from
embarrassing examinations is a very common feature in docu
ments of this date.

Richard Whiting as Abbot. jy
last Abbot of Glastonbury in his time-honoured
home shows him in friendly converse with his
near neighbour, Lord Stourton, who was the
head of an ancient race which popular tradition
had justly linked for centuries with the Bene
dictine order, and which even in the darkest
days of modern English Catholicity proved
itself a firm and hereditary friend.
Before passing on to the closing acts of the
venerable abbot's life and to his martyrdom,
it is necessary to premise a few words on
suppression in its legal aspect. There seems
to be abroad an impression that the monasteries
were all, in fact, dissolved by order of Parlia
ment, and accordingly that a refusal of sur
render to the king, such as is found at
Glastonbury, was an act which, however
morally justifiable as a refusal to betray a trust,
and even heroic when resistance entailed the
last penalty, was yet in defiance of the law of
the land. And, to take this particular case of
Glastonbury, it is often stated, that when in
sisting on its surrender the king was only
requiring that to be given up into his hands
which Parliament had already conferred on

78 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
him. However common the impression, it is
false. What the act (27 Hen. VIII., cap. 28)
of February, 1536, did was to give to the king
and his heirs such monasteries only as were
under the yearly value of .£200, or such as
should within a "year next after the making
of" the act "be given or granted to his
majesty by any abbot," &c. So far, therefore,
from handing over to the king the property
of all the monasteries, Parliament distinctly
recognised, at least in the case of all save the
lesser religious houses, the rights of their then
owners, and contemplated their passing to the
king's hands only by the voluntary cession of
the actual possessors. How any surrender
was to be brought about was left to the king
and Crumwell, and the minions on whose
devices there is no need to dwell. Before a
recalcitrant superior, who would yield neither
to blandishments, bribery nor threats, the king,
so far as the act would help him, was powerless.
- For this case, however, provision was made,
though but indirectly, in the act of April, 1539
(31 Hen. VIII., cap. 13). This act, which
included a retrospective clause covering the

The Beginning of the End. 79
illegal suppression of the greater monasteries
which had already passed into the king's hands,
granted to Henry all monasteries, &c, which
shall hereafter happen to be dissolved, sup
pressed, renounced, relinquished," forfeited,
given up or come unto the king's highness.
These terms seem wide enough, but there is
also an ominous parenthesis referring to such
other religious houses as "shall happen to
come to the king's highness by attainder or
attainders of treason." The clause did not
find its way into the act unawares. It will be
seen that it was Crumwell's care how and in
whose case the clause should become operative.
And with just so much of countenance as is
thus given him by the act, with the king to
back him, the monasteries of Glastonbury,
Reading and Colchester, from which no sur
render could be obtained, "were, against every
principle of received law, held to fall by the
attainder of their abbots for high treason."1

1 Hallam, Constitutional Hist., i., 72. Harpsfield, Pretended
Divorce, ed. Pocock (Camden Society), p. 300, says : " Such
as would voluntarily give over were rewarded with large annual

80 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
The very existence of the clause is, more
over, evidence that by this time Crumwell
knew that among the superiors of the few
monasteries yet standing, there were men with
whom, if the king was not to be baulked of
his intent, the last conclusions would have to
be tried. To him the necessity would have
been paramount, by every means in his power,
to sweep away what he rightly regarded as
the strongholds of the papal power in the
country, and to get rid of these "spies of the
pope."1 Such unnatural enemies of their
prince and gracious lord would fittingly be
first singled out, that their fate might serve as
a warning to other intending evil-doers. Per
haps, too, Whiting's repute for blamelessness
of life, the discipline which he was known to
maintain in his monastery and his great terri
torial infiuence may all have conduced to point
him out as an eminently proper subject to
proceed against, as tending to show the nation

pensions, and with other pleasures. Against some other there
were found quarrels, as against Hugh Farindon, Abbot of
Reading . . . against Richard Whiting, Abbot of Glaston, &c."
1 R. O. Crumwell Correspondence, xv., No. 7.

Richard Whiting as Abbot. 81
that where the crime of resistance to the king's
will was concerned there could be no such
thing as an extenuating circumstance, no-
consideration which would avail to mitigate
the penalty.

CHAPTER VI.
The Beginning of the End.
In the story of what follows we are con
tinually hampered by the singularly defective
nature of the various records relating to the
closing years of Crumwell's administration.
We are therefore frequently left to supply
links by conjectures, but conjectures in which,
from the known facts and such documentary
evidence as remains, there is sufficient assurance
of being in the main correct.
Already, in 1538, rumour had spoken of
the coming dissolution; and the fact that all
over the country even the greatest houses of
religion, one after another, were falling into the
king's hands by surrender, voluntary or, en
forced, tended to give colour to the current
tales. Henry's agents, it is true, had -en-

The Beginning of the End. 83
deavoured to dissemble any royal intention of
a general suppression of the monastic body.
They not only denied boldly and unblushingly
that the king had any such design, but urged
upon Crumwell the advisability of putting a
stop to the persistent reports on this subject.
The far-seeing minister, fully alive to the
danger, drafted a letter to reassure the religious
superiors, and dispatched it probably in the
first instance to Glastonbury.1
" Albeit," this letter runs, " I doubt not but
(having not long since received the King's
highness's letters wherein his majesty signified
to you that using yourselves like his good and
faithful subjects, his grace would not in any
wise interrupt you in your state and kind of
living ; and that his pleasure therefore was that
in case any man should declare anything to the
contrary you should cause him to be appre
hended and kept in sure custody till further

1 The previous letter in the Cotton MS. Cleopatra E. iv. is
endorsed : " The mynute of a letter drawn by Mr. Moryson
to th'Abbot of Glastonbury." This endorsement is certainly
wrong ; but Mr. Gairdner {Calendar xiii., No. 573 note) thinks
the letters may possibly have always been together and the
endorsement refers to the second.

84 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
knowledge of his grace's pleasure), you would
so firmly repose yourself in the tenour of the
said letters as no man's words, nor any volun
tary surrender made by any governor or com
pany of any religious house since that time,
shall put you in any doubt or fear of suppression
or change of your kind of life and policy."
The king, however, feels that there are people
who "upon any voluntary and frank surrender,
would persuade and blow abroad a general and
violent suppression;" and, because some houses
have lately been surrendered, the king commands
me to say " that unless there had been over
tures made by the said houses that have re
signed, his grace would never have received the
same, and his majesty intendeth not in any wise
to trouble you or to desire for the suppression
of any house that standeth, except they shall
either desire of themselves with one whole
consent to resign and forsake the same, or else
misuse themselves contrary to their allegiance."
In this last case, the document concludes, they
shall lose "more than their houses and pos
sessions, that is the loss also of their lives."
Wherefore take care of your houses and beware

The Beginning of the End. 85
of spoiling them, like some have done " who
imagined they were going to be dissolved."1
This letter could scarcely have done much to
reassure Abbot Whiting as to the king's real
intentions, in view of the obvious facts which
each day made them clearer. By the begin
ning of 1539, Glastonbury was the only
religious house left standing in the whole
county of Somerset. Rumours must have
reached the abbey of the fall of Bath and
Keynsham, shortly after the Christmas of the
previous year, and of strange methods to
which Crumwell's agents had resorted in order
to gain possession of Hinton Charterhouse
and Benedictine Athelney. At the former,
the determination of the monks to hold to their
house was apparently in the end broken down
by a resort to a rigid examination of the reli
gious on the dangerous royal-supremacy ques
tion, which resulted in one of their number
being put in prison for " affirming the Bishop
of Rome to be Vicar of Christ, and that he
ought to be taken for head of the church."
1 B. Mus. Cott. MS. Cleop. E. iv., f. 68.

86 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
This of itself must have prepared the mind
of Abbot Whiting for the final issue which
would have to be faced.
The short respite granted before conclusions
were tried with him, could have been to all at
Glastonbury little less than a long-drawn
suspense, during which the abbot possessed
his soul in peace, attending cheerfully to the
daily calls of duty. They were left in no doubt
as to the real meaning of a dissolution and
had witnessed the immediate results which
followed upon it. The rude dismantling of
churches and cloisters, the rapid sales of
vestments and other effects, the pulling down
of the lead from roofs and gutters, and the
breaking up of bells had gone on all around
them ; whilst homeless monks and the poor
who had from time immemorial found relief
in their necessities at religious houses now
swept away must have all crowded to Glas
tonbury during the last few months of its
existence. For eleven weeks the royal
wreckers, like a swarm of locusts, wandered
over Somerset, " defacing, destroying and
prostrating the churches, cloisters, belfreys,

The Beginning of the End. 87
and other buildings of the late monasteries ; "
and the roads were worn with carts carrying
away the lead melted from the roofs, barrels
of broken bell-metal, and other plunder.
It was not till the autumn of the year
1539, that any final steps began to be taken
with regard to Glastonbury and its venerable
abbot. Among Crumwell's " remembrances,"
still extant in his own handwriting, of things
to do, or matters to speak about to the king,
in the beginning of September this year occurs
the following : — " Item, for proceeding against
the abbots of Reading, Glaston and the other,
in their own countries."1 From this it is clear
that some time between the passing of the act
giving to the crown the possession of all
dissolved or surrendered monasteries, which
came into force in April, 1539, and the Sep
tember of this year, these abbots must have
been sounded, and it had been found that
compliance in regard of a surrender was not
to be expected.2 By the sixteenth of the latter
1 B. Mus. Cott. MS. Titus, B. i., f. 446a.
2 In the spring of the year, Glastonbury, in common with
other churches in England, was relieved of what it pleased the

88 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
month Crumwell's design had been communi
cated to his familiar Layton, and had elicited
from him a reply in which he abjectly asks
pardon for having praised the abbot at the
time of the visitation. "The Abbot of Glaston
bury," he adds, "appeareth neither then nor
now to have known God, nor his prince, nor
any part of a good Christian man's religion."1
Three days later, on Friday, September 19,
the royal commissioners, Layton, Pollard and
Moyle, suddenly arrived at Glastonbury about
ten o'clock in the morning. The abbot had
not been warned of their intended visit, and
was then at his grange of Sharpham, about a

king to consider its " superfluous plate.'' Pollard, Tregonwell
and Petre on May 2nd, 1539, handed to Sir John Williams,
the keeper of the royal treasure-house, 493 ounces of gold,
16,000 ounces of gilt plate and 28,700 ounces of parcel gilt and
silver plate taken from the monasteries in the west of England.
In this amount was included the superfluous plate of Glaston
bury. Besides this weight of gold and silver there was placed
in the treasury " two collets of gold wherein standeth two
coarse emeralds ; a cross of silver gilt, garnished with a great
coarse emerald, two 'balaces' and two sapphires, lacking a
knob at one of the ends of the same cross ; a superaltar
garnished with silver gilt and part gold, called the great sapphire
of Glastonbury ; a great piece of unicorn's horn, a piece of
mother of pearl like a shell, eight branches of coral " (Monastic
Treasures, Abbotsford Club, p. 24).
' Ellis, Original Letters, 3rd Series, iii., p. 247.

The Beginning of the End.

89

mile from the monastery. Thither they hurried
"without delay," and after telling him their
purpose examined him at once " upon certain

Remains at Sharpham of the grange of the Abbots of
Glastonbury.

articles, and for that his answer was not then
to our purpose," they say; "we advised him to
call to his remembrance that which he had
forgotten, and so declare the truth."1 Then
1 The whole of this account is from the letter of the commis
sioners to Crumwell, in Wright, p. 255.

90 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
they at once took him back to the abbey, and
when night came on proceeded to search the
abbot's papers and ransack his apartments
" for letters and books, and found in his study,
secretly laid, as well a written book of argu
ments against the divorce of the king's majesty
and the lady dowager, which we take to be a
great matter, as also divers pardons, copies of
bulls, and the counterfeit life of Thomas Becket
in print; but we could not," they write, "find
any letter that was material."
Furnished, however, with these pieces of
evidence as to the tendency of Whiting's mind,
the inquisitors proceeded further to examine
him concerning the "articles received from
your lordship " (Crumwell). In his answers
appeared, they considered, "his cankered and
traitorous mind against the king's majesty and
his succession." To these replies he signed
his name, "and so with as fair words as" they
could, " being but a very weak man and
sickly," they forthwith sent him up to London
to the Tower, that Crumwell might examine
him for himself.
The rest of the letter is significant for the

The Beginning of the End. 91
eventual purpose they knew their master would
regard as of primary importance : —
" As yet we have neither discharged servant
nor monk ; but now, the abbot being gone, we
will, with as much celerity as we may, proceed
to the dispatching of them. We have in
money .£300 and above ; but the certainty of
plate and other stuff there as yet we know not,
for we have not had opportunity for the same ;
whereof we shall ascertain your lordship so
shortly as we may. This is also to advertise
your lordship that we have found a fair chalice
of gold, and divers other parcels of plate, which
the abbot had hid secretly from all such com
missioners as have been there in times past ;
and as yet he knoweth not that we have found
the same ; whereby we think that he thought
to make his hand by his untruth to his king's
majesty." A week later, on September 28th,1 they again
write to Crumwell that they "have daily found
and tried out both money and plate," hidden in
secret places in the abbey, and conveyed for
' Wright, p. 257.

92 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
safety to the country. They could not tell him
how much they had so far discovered, but it
was sufficient, they thought, to have " begun a
new abbey," and they concluded by asking
what the king wished to have done in respect
of the two monks who were the treasurers of
the church, and the two lay clerks of the
sacristy, who were chiefly to be held respon
sible in the matter.
On the 2nd October the inquisitors write
again to their master to say that they have
come to the knowledge of "divers and sundry
treasons" committed by Abbot Whiting, "the
certainty whereof shall appear unto your lord
ship in a book herein enclosed, with the
accusers' names put to the same, which we
think to be very high and rank treasons." The
original letter, preserved in the Record Office,
clearly shows by the creases in the soiled
yellow paper that some small book or folded
papers have been enclosed. Whatever it was,
it is no longer forthcoming. Just at the critical
moment we are again deprived, therefore, of a
most interesting and important source of in
formation. In view, however, of the common

The Beginning of the End. 93
sufferings of these abbots, who were dealt with
together, the common fate which befel them,
and the common cause assigned by contempo
rary writers for their death, — viz., their attainder
" of high treason for denying the king to be
supreme head of the Church," as Hall, the
contemporary London lawyer (who reports
what must have been current in the capital),
phrases it — there can be no doubt that these
depositions were much of the same nature as
those made against Thomas Marshall, Abbot of
Colchester, to which subsequent reference will
be made. It is certain that with Abbot Whit
ing- in the Tower and Crumwell's commis-
o
sioners engaged in "dispatching" the monks
"with as much celerity" as possible, Glaston
bury was already regarded as part of the royal
possessions. Even before any condemnation
the matter is taken as settled, and on October
the 24th, 1539, Pollard handed over to the
royal treasurer the riches still left at the abbey
as among the possessions of " attainted persons
and places."1
1 Monastic Treasures (Abbotsford Club), p. 38. These con
sisted of 71 ozs. of gold with stones, 7,214 ozs. of gilt plate, and
6,387 ozs. of silver.

94 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
Whilst Layton and his fellows were rummag
ing at Glastonbury, Abbot Whiting was safely
lodged in the Tower of London. There he
was subjected to searching examinations. A
note in Crumwell's own hand, entered in his
"remembrances," says :
" Item. Certain persons to be sent to the
Tower for the further examination of the Abbot
of Glaston."1
At this time it was supposed that Parliament,
which ought to have met on November ist of
this year, would be called upon to consider the
charges against the abbot. ' At least Marillac,
the French ambassador, who shows that he
was always well informed on public matters
writes to his master that this is to be done.
Even when the assembly was delayed till the
arrival of the king's new wife, Ann of Cleves,
the ambassador repeats that the decision of
Whiting's case will now be put off. He adds
that "they have found a manuscript in favour
of queen Catherine, and against the marriage
of queen Anne, who was afterwards beheaded,"
1 B. Mus. Cott., MS. Titus, B. i., f. 441 a.

The Beginning of the End. 95
which is objected against the abbot.1 Poor
Catherine had been at rest in her grave for
four years, and her rival in the affections of
Henry had died on the scaffold nearly as many
years, before Layton and his fellow-inquisitors
found the written book of arguments in
Whiting's study, and "took it to be a great
matter " against him. It is hardly likely that,
even if more loyal to Catherine's memory than
there is any possible reason to suppose, Whiting
would stick at a point where More and Fisher
could yield, and would not have given his ad
hesion to the succession as settled by Parlia
ment. But as in their case, it was the thorny
questions which surrounded the divorce, the
subject all perilous of "treason," which brought
him at last, as it brought them first, to the
scaffold. It is more than strange that the ordinary pro
cedure was not carried out in this case. Ac
cording to all law, Abbot Whiting and the
Abbots of Reading and Colchester should have
been arraigned before Parliament, as they were
1 Kaulek, Inventaire Analytique, ut sup., No. 161.

96 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
members of the House of Peers, but no such
bill of attainder was ever presented, and in
fact the execution had taken place before the
Parliament came together.1
The truth is, that Abbot Whiting and the
others were condemned to death as the result
of secret inquisitions in the Tower. Crumwell,
acting as " prosecutor, judge and jury,"2 had
really arranged for their execution before they
left their prison. What happened in the case
of Abbot Whiting at Wells, and in that of
Abbot Cook at Reading, was but a ghastly
mockery of justice, enacted merely to cover the
illegal and iniquitous proceedings which had

1 According to Wriothesley's Chronicle they were arraigned
in the " Counter." " Also in this month [November] the abbates
of Glastonburie, Reding and Colchester were arrayned in the
Counter." It is worthy of notice that whilst all trace or record
of a trial has disappeared, the legal records are explicit as to a
point of fact. Of course the king could only obtain the posses
sions of the monastery by the attainder of the abbot for high
treason, and accordingly the official documents all speak of the
attainder for high treason. For instance L. T. R. Memoranda
Roll, 32 Henry VIII., m. 2, has: "Omnes libertates &c. dicti
nuper abbatis Glaston sunt in manu dicti Regis nunc ratione
attincturae prsefati abbatis qui nuper de alta prodicione attinctus
fuit." These presentments in the Counter or at Wells were
evidently empty shows, intended to impress the populace.
2 Froude, Hist., iii., p. 432.

«^_-4'7''"^/W^*r-^p^ G^a~~&~~**yp

7ipy J^^&Uy@±pj~tf-£ gy-&±

/fld<$*

Facsimile of part of Crumwell's "Remembrances,"
Cotton MS., Titus B. i. / 441a.

The Beginning of the End. 99
condemned them untried. This Crumwell has
written down with his own hand. He notes in
his " remembrances " : — 1
Item. Councillors to give evidence against the abbot
of Glaston, Richard Pollard, Lewis Forstell and Thomas
Moyle. Item. To see that the evidence be well sorted
and the indictments well drawn against the said abbots
and their accomplices. Item. How the king's learned
counsel shall be with me all this day, for the full con
clusion of the indictments.
And then, to sum up all :—
Item. The Abbot of Glaston to be tried at Glaston,
and also executed there.2
As Crumwell was so solicitous about the
fate of the abbots as to devote the whole of
one of his precious days to the final settle
ment of their case, in later times ' no less
great was the solicitude of his panegyrist,
1 Ut sup., ff. 441 a and b.
-' The following is a transcript of the passages contained in
the facsimile opposite. " Item certayn persons to be sent to
the Towre for the further examenacyon of the abbot of Glaston.
Item letters to be sent with the copye of the judgement ageynst
Sir John Sayntlow's men for the rape and burgalrye don in
Somersetshyre unto lorde presedent Russell with a streyt com-
mandement to procede to justyce. Item the abbot Redyng
to be sent down to be tryed and executyd at Reding with his
complycys. Item the abbot of Glaston to tryed at Glaston
and also executyd there with his complycys."

ioo The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
Burnet, to " discover the impudence of
Sanders" in saying they suffered for denying
the king's supremacy, and to prove that they
did' not. Even at a time when records were
not so accessible as they now are, Collier,
Burnet's contemporary, could see clearly
enough where lay the truth. "What the
particulars were (of the abbots' attainder) our
learned Church historian (Burnet) confesses 'he
can't tell ; for the record of their attainders is
lost.' But, as he goes on, ' some of our own
writers (Hall, Grafton) deserve a severe cen
sure, who write it was for denying, &c, the
king's supremacy. Whereas, if they had not
undertaken to write the history without any
information at all, they must have seen that
the whole clergy, and especially the abbots,
had over and over again acknowledged the
king's supremacy.' But how does it appear
our historians are mistaken ? Has this gen
tleman seen the Abbot of Colchester's indict
ment or perused his record of attainder? He
confesses no. How then is his censure made
good ? He offers no argument beyond con
jecture. He concludes the Abbot of Col-

The Beginning of the End. 101
chester had formerly acknowledged the king's
supremacy, and from thence infers he could
not suffer now for denying it. But do not
people's opinions alter sometimes, and con
science and courage improve ? Did not Bishop
Fisher and Cardinal Pool, at least as this author
represents them, acknowledge the king's supre
macy at first ? And yet it is certain they after
wards showed themselves of another mind to
a very remarkable degree. . . . Farther,
does not himself tell us that many of the
Carthusians were executed for their open
denying the king's supremacy, and why then
might not some of the abbots have the same
belief and fortitude with others of their fra
ternity ? " {Eccl. Hist., ii., 173.) The real way
of reaching them was through conscience, a
way which, as we have seen, had just before
been tried in the case of the Abbot Whiting's
near neighbours, the Carthusians of Hinton.
" To reach the abbots, therefore," continues
Collier," that other way, the oath of supre
macy was offered them, and upon their refusal
they were condemned for high treason (p. 164).
But amidst these cares Crumwell never for-

102 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
got the king's business, the "great matter," the
end which this iniquity was to compass. With
the prize now fairly within his grasp, he
notes : —
The plate of Glastonbury, 11,000 ounces and over,
besides golden. The furniture of the house of Glaston.
In ready money from Glaston, ^"1,100 and over. The
rich copes from Glaston. The whole year's revenue of
Glaston. The debts of Glaston, ^"2,000 and above.1
Layton has borne witness to the state of
spirituals in Glastonbury ; Crumwell gives final
testimony to the abbot's good administration of
temporals. The house by this time had,
according to Crumwell's construction, come to
the king's highness by attainder of treason. It
remained now to inaugurate the line of policy
on which Elizabeth improved later, and after,
in the secret tribunal of the Tower, condemn
ing the abbot without trial for cause of con
science in a sentence that involved forfeiture
of life and goods, to put him to death, so Lord
Russell says, as if for common felony, the " rob
bing of Glastonbury Church."

1 Ibid., f. 446 a. The debts named here were evidently due
to Glastonbury.

The Beginning of the End. 103
And now it only remains to follow the
venerable man on his pilgrimage to the scene
of his martyrdom.1
As we have seen under Crumwell's hand,
Abbot Whiting's fate was already settled before
he left the Tower. In the interrogatories, pre
liminary but decisive, which he had there
undergone, the abbot had come face to face
with the inevitable issue. He knew to what
end the way through the Tower had, from the

1 The original edition of Sander simply says that the three
abbots and the two priests, Rugg and Onion, " ob negatam
Henrici pontificiam potestatem martyrii coronam adepti sunt."
In the second and later editions this is cut out, another reason
is assigned for their death, and an obviously legendary narrative
about Whiting is inserted in the text. It is impossible to credit
many of these oft-repeated statements. They seem to embody
the gossip of half a century later ; in some points running near
enough to the truth, in others partaking of legend ; such as the
sensational scene, wanting alike in sense and probability, in the
hall of the palace on the abbot's arrival at Wells ; the assembly
prepared to receive him, his proceeding to take the place of
honour among the first, the unexpected summons to stand
down and answer to the charge of treason, the old man's won
dering inquiry what this meant, the whispered assurance that
it was all a matter of form to strike terror — into whom or
wherefore the story does not tell. These and later details are
here entirely thrown aside, since they cannot be reconciled with
the official documents of the time and private letters of the
persons engaged in the act itself.

104 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
time of More and Fisher to his own hour, led
those who had no other satisfaction to give the
king than that which he could offer.
It is not impossible, however, that hopes may
have been held out to him that in his extreme
old age and weakness of body he might be
spared extremities ; this supposition seems to
receive some countenance from the narrative
given below. But Henry and Crumwell had
determined that Abbot Whiting should suffer
before all the world the last indignity. And
they designed for him the horrible death of a
traitor in the sight of his own subjects who
had known and loved him for many years, on
the scene of his own former greatness.
The following extract from an unknown
but contemporary writer, in giving the only
details of the journey homeward that are known
to exist, manifests the abbot's characteristic
simplicity and perfect possession of soul in
patience, together with a real sense of what
the end would certainly be.
Going homewards to Glastonbury, the abbot had one
Pollard appointed to wait upon him, who was an especial
favourer of Crumwell, whom the abbot neither desired

The Beginning of the End. 105
to accompany him, neither yet dared to refuse him. At
the next bait, when the abbot went to wash, he desired
Mr. Pollard to come wash with him, who by no means
would be entreated thereunto. The abbot seeing such
civility, mistrusted so much the more such courtesy was
not void of some subtility, and said unto him : " Mr.
Pollard, if you be to me a companion, I pray you wash
with me and sit down ; but if you be my keeper and I your
prisoner, tell me plainly, that I may prepare my mind to
to go to another room better fitting my fortunes. And
if you be neither, I shall be content to ride without your
company." Whereupon Pollard protested that he did
forbear to do what the abbot desired him only in respect
of the reverence he bore his age and virtues, and that
he was appointed by those in authority to bear him
company of worship's sake, and therefore might not
forsake him till he did see him safe at Glastonbury.
Notwithstanding all this, the abbot doubted somewhat,
and told one (Thomas) Home, whom he had brought up
from a child, that he misdoubted (him) somewhat, Judas
having betrayed his master. And yet though (Hornej
were both privy and plotter of his master's fall, yet did
he sweare most intolerably he knew of no harm towards
him, neither should any be done to him as long as he
was in his company ; wishing besides that the devil
might have him if he were otherwise than he told him.
But before he came to Glastonbury, Home forsook,
and joined himself unto his enemies.1
1 B. Mus. Sloane MS. 2495. The passage in the text is taken
from an early seventeenth-century life of Henry VIII. It is,
however, a free translation of Arundel MS., 151, No. 62, which
is a hitherto unnoticed account of the divorce, written somewhere
about the year 1557, and dedicated to Philip and Mary. Some of

io6

CHAPTER VII.
The Martyrdom.
The venerable abbot thus journeyed home
in the company of Pollard. It was this
Pollard who had been Crumwell's agent in
sending him to the Tower, who had weeks ago
turned the monks out of the monastery and
had begun the wrecking of Glastonbury Abbey,
a house, which on his first arrival there he had
described to his employer as " great, goodly
and so princely that we have not seen the like ;"
and in another letter he repeats the same as
surance, adding that " it is a house meet for the
king's majesty, and for no one else."1
the details agree with those given about Whiting by Le Grand
{Defense, iii., p. 210), who may have drawn them from the
same source.
1 Wright, Suppression of the Monasteries, pp. 256, 258.

The Martyrdom. 107
Measures had already been taken to have all
secure at Wells, although Abbot Whiting had
evidently been left in ignorance of the fact that
there was now no Glastonbury Abbey for him
to return to. Crumwell's captive reached Wells
on Friday, November 14, and once safely
brought back into his own country there was
neither' delay nor dissembling. The plan
devised was rushed through without giving
a soul among the unhappy actors in the
scene time to reflect upon what they were
doing — -time to recover their better selves —
time to avert the guilt which in some measure
must fall upon them. In accordance with the
wicked policy so often pursued in Tudor times,
a jury — the people themselves — were made
active agents in accomplishing the royal ven
geance, the execution of which had been
already irrevocably settled in London. John,
Lord Russell, had for some time past been
superintending the necessary arrangements in
the county of Somerset itself. His business
had been to get together a jury which he could
trust to do, or perhaps in this case tacitly coun
tenance, the king's will, and it was one part of

108 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
his care, when all was over, to send to Crumwell
their names with a view, doubtless, of securing
their due reward. Unfortunately, although
Russell's letter is preserved the list enclosed has
perished. But a letter from Pollard to Crum
well gives the names of some who distinguished
themselves by their zeal, and who had been
" very diligent to serve the king at this time."
Among these first of all is " my brother Paulet,"
for whom is bespoken " the surveyorship of
Glaston," with the promise to Crumwell that
"his lordship's goodness," showed in this
matter, Paulet when he takes the prize "shall
recompense to his little power." Other dili
gent persons whom Pollard specially names are
John Sydenham and Thomas Horner, and
finally Nicholas Fitzjames, the same who, but
a year or two before, had written to Crumwell
in Abbot Whiting's behalf.
As is well known from the history of the
Pilgrimage of Grace, jury-making had at this
time been raised to an art, — an art so exquisitely
refined that it aimed at making friends, kins
folk, even brothers the accomplices by word of
mouth in the legal or illegal murders which

The Martyrdom. 109
disgraced this reign. The minds of the men
selected in this case to register the decrees
of the kingly omnipotence, escape our means
of inquiry, but Lord Russell has recorded
" that they formed as worshipful a jury as were
found here these many years," and of this fact
he "ensured" his "good lord" Crumwell.
Russell's care, moreover, had been diligently
exercised, not merely in assembling the jury,
but in getting together an audience for the
occasion. His efforts were successful, for he
gathered at Wells such a concourse of people,
that he was able to declare "there was never
seen in these parts so great appearance as were
here at this present time." He adds the
assurance so tediously common in documents
of that pre-eminently courtly age, that none
had ever been seen "better willing to serve
the king."1
This was the scene which met Abbot Whit
ing's eyes in Pollard's company as he entered
the city of Wells, where so often before he had
been received as a venerated and honoured
1 Wright, Suppression of the Monasteries, p. 260.

no The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
guest. Unfortunately we have no direct and
continuous narrative of all that took place. If
it was dangerous to speak it was still more
dangerous to write in those days, except of
course in one sense, — that which was pleasing
to the court. Fortunately two letters survive,
written by the chief managers of the business,
John, Lord Russell, and Richard Pollard, one of
the "counsel" who had been engaged in the
Tower with Crumwell, for the careful draw
ing of the indictment against the abbot. Both
were written on the Sunday, the day following
the execution. An earlier letter by Pollard,
written on the day itself and evidently giving
more details, is wanting in the vast mass of
Crumwell's papers. This, the earliest news of
the accomplishment of the king's will, was not
improbably taken by the ready minister to the
king himself and left with his majesty. Frag
mentary though the records that exist are, and
only giving here a hint, there a mere outline
of what took place, without order and without
sequence, they in this form have a freshness
and truthfulness which still enable us to realise
what actually took place.

Ruins of the Hall of the Bishop's Palace at Wells, said to have been the Court where
the proceedings took place.

The Martyrdom. 1 1 1
On the abbot's arrival in the city of Wells,
the business was begun without waiting to give
the condemned man time for rest or for
thought. Pollard was in charge of the in
dictment, over which Crumwell had spent his
day, in the drafting of which so many counsel
learned in the law had exercised their ingenuity,
and which was the outcome of the secret ex
aminations conducted during the abbot's two
months' imprisonment in the Tower. But it
was by no means intended that a drop of bit
terness in the cup should be spared him ;
every successive stage of indignity was to be
offered the venerable man till his last breath
and then to his lifeless body. He was to be
struck in the house of his friends, and by his
own dependents. From out the crowd there
came forward new accusers, " his tenants and
others," putting up "many accusations for
wrongs and injuries he had done them : "
not of course that it was in the least in
tended that there should be time for enquiry
into their truth ; the mere accusations were
enough, and they were part of the drama
that had been elaborated with such care.

112 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
But this was not the only business of the
day. The venerable man was to be asso
ciated and numbered with a rabble of common
felons, and to stand in the same rank with
them. Together with the abbot of the great
monastery of Glastonbury there were a number
of people of the lowest class — how many we
know not — who were accused of " rape and
burglary." "They were all condemned," says
Russell, and four of them " the next day, if not
the same day, put to execution at the place of
the act done, which is called the Mere, and
there adjudged to hang still in chains to the
example of others."
Of any verdict or of any condemnation of
the abbot and of his two monks nothing is said
by Russell or Pollard, but they proceed at once
to the execution.1
It is not impossible, seeing the rapid way in
which the whole business was carried through,

1 After a careful consideration of the evidence, my belief is
that there was no trial of the abbot and his two companions
at Wells. The sentence passed on them in London was prob
ably published to the jury there, but there is nothing to show
that it was asked to find any verdict.

The Martyrdom. 113
that had the scene of the so-called trial been
Glastonbury in place of Wells, the abbot would
have met his fate and gained his crown that
very day. But the king and his faithful
minister, Crumwell, had devised in the town of
Glastonbury a scene which was to be more
impressive than that which had taken place in
the neighbouring city, more calculated to strike
terror into the hearts of the old man's friends
and followers.
After being pestered by Pollard with "divers
articles and interrogatories," the result of which
was that he would accuse no man but himself,
nor " confess no more gold nor silver, nor any
thing more than he did before you [Crumwell]
in the Tower," the next morning, Saturday,
November 15,1 the venerable abbot with his
two monks, John Thorne and Roger James,
were delivered over to the servants of Pollard

1 It is generally stated that the martyrdom took place on
November 14. The authority for this is a statement in the
original edition of Sander, that the three abbots obtained the
crown of martyrdom "ad decimum octavum kalendas Decem-
bris." Mr. David Lewis in his translation has not noticed the
error. It is certain from the original letters of Pollard and
Russell that the true date is Saturday, November 15.

114 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
for the performance of what more had to be
done. Under this escort they were carried
from Wells to Glastonbury. Arrived at the
entrance of the town the abbot was made to
dismount. And now all the brutal indignities
and cruel sufferings attending the death of a
traitor condemned for treason were inflicted
upon him. And in truth, like many a true
and noble Englishman of that day, Richard
Whiting was, in the sense of Crumwell and
Henry, a traitor to his king. The case from
their point of view is well expressed by one
of the truculent preachers patronised by the
sovereign as his most fitting apologists.
" For had not Richard1 Whiting, that was
Abbot of Glastonbury, trow ye, great cause, all
things considered, to play so traitorous a part
as he hath played, whom the king's highness
made of a vile, beggarly, monkish merchant,
governor and ruler of seven thousand marks
by the year? Trow ye this was not a good
pot of wine ? Was not this a fair almose at
one man's door ? Such a gift had been worth
1 The name in the MS. is John, but it is evidently a mistake.

General View of Glastonbury Tor.

Face fi. n4-

The Martyrdom. 1 1 5
grammercy to many a man. But Richard
Whiting having always a more desirous eye to
treason than to truth, careless, laid apart both
God's goodness and the king's, and stuck hard
by the Bishop of Rome and the Abbot of
Reading in the quarrel of the Romish Church.
Alas ! wrhat a stony heart had (Richard) Whit
ing, to be so unkind to so loving and benefi
cent a, prince, and so false a traitor to Henry
VIII., king of his native country, and so true,
I say, to that cormorant of Rome."
In this new meaning of treason, Abbot
Whiting was adjudged the traitor's death. At
the outskirts of his own town his venerable
limbs were extended on a hurdle, to which a
horse was attached. In this way he was
dragged on that bleak November morning
along the rough hard ground through the
streets of Glastonbury, of which he and his
predecessors had so long been the loved and
honoured lords and masters. It was thus
among his own people that, now at the age
of well nigh fourscore years, Abbot Whiting
made his last pilgrimage through England's
"Roma Secunda." As a traitor for conscience
sake he was drawn past the glorious monas-

116 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
tery, now desolate and deserted, past the
great church, that home of the saints and
whilom sanctuary of this country's greatness,
now devastated and desecrated, its relics of
God's holy ones dispersed, its tombs of kings
dishonoured, on further still to the summit of
that hill which rises yet in the landscape in
solitary and majestic greatness, the perpetual
memorial of the deed now to be enacted.1
For, thanks to the tenacity with which the
memory of "good Abbot Whiting" has been
treasured by generations of the townsfolk,
1 It has been suggested that the place of Abbot Whiting's
martyrdom was not the Tor, but a smaller hill nearer the town,
called Chalice Hill. The ground of this supposition is that the
site of the abbey is not visible from the Tor, whilst it is from the
latter hill. The steps by which the conclusion was arrived
at that this consequently was the place of martyrdom, would
appear to be the following : (i) Sander, in the original edition
of the Schism, states that the abbot was executed on the Tor.
(2) The Roman editor makes on this an explanatory addition,
perfectly reasonable when writing for persons who were not
acquainted with Glastonbury. The execution took place, he
says, ad montis editi cacumen qui monasterio imminet, i.e., over
hangs, that is, rises above the monastery. This has been taken
in the sense of overlooking, and next " overlook " in its strictest
sense, as implying that the abbey was visible from the place
of execution. It is only necessary, in order to refute a theory
having no better basis than inaccuracy and misunderstanding,
to refer to the simple assertion of the persons engaged in the
execution of Abbot Whiting, who wrote at the very time it was
taking place, and who knew perfectly well what Tor hill was.

The Martyrdom.
hill to-day is

117

Abbot Whiting's

the very
monument. His last act was simple. Now about to ap
pear before a tribunal that was searching, just

Summit of Tor Hill.

and merciful, he asks forgiveness first of God
and then of man, even of those who had most
offended against justice in his person and had

118 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
not rested until they had brought him to the
gallows amidst every incident that could add
to such a death — ignominy and shame. The
venerable abbot remains to the last the same
as he always appears throughout his career ;
suffering in self-possession and patience the
worst that man could inflict upon his mortal
body, in the firm assurance that in all this he
was but following in the footsteps of that Lord
and Master in whose service from his youth
upwards he had spent his life.
In this supreme moment his two monks,
John Thorne1 and Roger James,2 the one a
1 A comparison of the lists of monks qualified to take part in
the election of Abbot Whiting in 1523 and the list appended to
the acknowledgment of supremacy in 1534 seems to show that
John Arthur, treasurer in 1523, is identical with John Thorne,
treasurer in 1539, martyred with Abbot Whiting. This com
parison also shows that the maker of the chair figured at p. 60,
can be no other than John Thorne, the martyr. The lists of
monks give only the Christian name and the name in religion
(in this case Arthur). In the legal proceedings, for the religious
name the family name, Thorne, is substituted.
The lists of 1523 and 1534 are noteworthy as showing how
keen was the interest taken by the Glastonbury monks in the
past of their house. Amongst the religious names occur :
Abaramathea, Joseph, Arthur, Derivian, Gildas, Benen, Aidan,
Ceolfrid, Indractus, Aldhelm, Dunstan, Ethelwold, Edgar,
and other saints connected with Glastonbury.
2 Roger James is evidently identical with Roger Wilfrid, who
in the list of 1534 was the youngest monk of the house.

Portrait of John Thorne, in the possession of the English
Benedictines of St. Edmund's, now settled at Douai.
Painted in the 17TH Century.

Facef. 118.

The Martyrdom. 1 1 9
man of mature age and experience, the other
not long professed, showed themselves worthy
sons of so good a father. They, too, begged
forgiveness of all and "took their death also
very patiently." Even Pollard seems moved
for the moment, for he adds with an un
wonted touch of tenderness, " whose souls
God pardon."
There is here no need to dwell on the
butchery which followed, and to tell how the
hardly lifeless body was cut down, divided
into four parts and the head struck off. One.
quarter was despatched to Wells, another to
Bath, a third to Ilchester, and the fourth to
Bridgewater, whilst the venerable head was
fixed over the great gateway of the abbey,
a ghastly warning of the retribution which
might and would fall on all, even the most
powerful or the most holy, if they ventured
to stand between the king and the accom
plishment of his royal will.
All this might indeed strike terror into the
people of the whole country, but not even the
will of a Tudor monarch could prevent the
people from forming their own judgment on

120 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
the deed that had been done, and preserving,
although robbed of the Catholic faith, the
memory of the "good Abbot Whiting." It
is easy to understand how, so soon after the
event as Mary's reign, the inhabitants of the
town and neighbourhood, with a vivid recollec
tion of the past, were ready and even eager to
make personal sacrifices for the restoration of
the abbey. But even a hundred years later,
and indeed even down to the present day, the
name of Abbot Whiting has been preserved
as a household word at Glastonbury and in its
neighbourhood. There are those living who,
when conversing with aged poor people, were
touched to find the affectionate reverence with
which his name was still treasured on the spot,
though why he died and what it was all about
they could not tell. That he was a good, a
kind, a holy man they knew, for they had been
told so in the days of their youth by those
who had gone before.

121

CHAPTER VIII.
Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading.
The abbeys of Reading and Colchester,
although of the first rank, seeing that their
abbots were peers of Parliament, and Reading
certainly among the most distinguished houses
of the country, had no such .position as that of
Glastonbury. They were both Norman crea
tions ; Reading being founded by King Henry
II. and chosen by him as his burial place. By
favour of its royal founder the commonalty of
Reading recognised the abbot as their lord ;
the mayor of the city " being the abbot's mayor,
&c," as the diocesan, Bishop Shaxton writes,
to Crumwell.
The history of the fall of Reading Abbey
and of the execution of Hugh Cook, or
Faringdon, the abbot, would be in its main
features but a repetition of the story of Glas-

122 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
tonbury and Abbot Whiting. The chief
source of information about the Abbot of
Reading is a paper, already referred to, which
is still to be found among the public records,
although it has remained unnoticed till four or
five years ago.1 It was so decayed with age
as to be almost dropping to pieces, but now
encased in tissue paper it is fortunately legible
almost in its entirety. The document in ques
tion is a virulent and brutal invective, evidently
a sermon, drawn up for the approval of Crum
well, to be delivered in justification of the
king's action in putting to death the three
Benedictine abbots and their companions. It
is unlikely that this proposed sermon was ever
delivered, for the deed was done, the abbots
were dead, their property was now all in the
king's hands, and from the point of view of
the authors the less said about the matter
the better. The draft was accordingly thrown
by Crumwell into the vast mass of papers of
all sorts accumulating on his hands, which on
his attainder was seized by the king and trans
ferred, as it stood, to the royal archives.
1 R. O. State Papers, 1539, No. 251.

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 123
It seems not improbable that the author of
the paper in question was Latimer. The
harangue is brutal ; it shows all his power of
effective alliteration, and it is written quite in
the spirit of the man who begged to be allowed
to preach at the martyrdom of Blessed John
Forrest, and to, be placed near him that he
might with better effect insult him in his death
agonies. It is certainly written by a person
fully acquainted with all the circumstances,
and throws light on many matters which
would be unintelligible without it. The paper
is so far of the highest value ; but in dealing
with its statements it is to be remembered
that the one object of the writer is to blacken
the memory of the martyred abbots, to
degrade them and to bring them by every
means into contempt.
From the account of Abbot Cook's origin
given by this writer, it would be gathered that
he was born in humble circumstances. He
thus apostrophises the abbot after his death :
"Ah, Hugh Cook, Hugh Cook! nay, Hugh
Scullion rather I may him call that would be
so unthankful to so merciful a prince, so un-

[24 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
kind to so loving a king, and so traitorous to
so true an emperor. The king's highness of
his charity took Hugh Cook out his cankerous
cloister and made him, being at that time the

Arms of Abbot Cook, from MS. L.io of the College of
Arms, p. 73.
most vilest, the most untowardest and the most
miserablest monk that was in the monastery of
Reading, born to nought else but to an old pair

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 125
of beggarly boots, and made him, I say, ruler
and governor of three thousand marks by the
year." But the testimony of the writer on a
point of fact such as this cannot be rated high.
It is probable that Abbot Cook belonged to
that class from which the English monastic
houses had been so largely recruited, "the
devouter and younger children of our nobility
and gentry who here had their education and
livelihood."1 There seems to be no doubt that
he belonged to a Kentish family known to the
heralds.2 His election to the office of abbot
took place in 1520. Grafton and Hall in their
chronicles, in accordance with the practice
common at the time, to depreciate falsely by
any and every means, those who had fallen
1 Bodleian MS. Wood, B. vi. Woodhope's " Book of Obits."
2 It has been considered doubtful whether the name of the
last abbot of Reading was Cook or Faringdon. He is some
times called by one, sometimes by the other name. In the
entry of his conviction for treason upon the Controlment Roll,
usually very exact, he is called only by the name of " Cooke."
As to the arms borne by the abbot, Cole, the antiquary, writes
as follows : — " In a curious MS. Book of Heraldry, on vellum
and painted, supposed to (be) written about 1520, contayning
all ye arms of Persons who had a chevron in the same, is this
entered : Hugh Faringdon, alias Cooke, Abbat of Reading.
Gules a chevron lozenge sable and argent inter 3 Bezants each

126 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
into the disfavour of the reigning tyrant, give
him the character of an illiterate person.
"The contrary," writes Browne Willis, "will
appear to such as will consult his Epistles to
the University of Oxford, remaining in the
register of that university, or shall have an
opportunity of perusing a book entitled The
art or craft of Rhetorick, written by Leonard
Cox, schoolmaster of Reading. 'Twas printed
in the year 1524, and is dedicated by the
author to this abbot. He speaks very wor
thily and honourably of Faringdon on account
of his learning."1

charged with a cinquefoil gules, on a chief argent a Dove inter
2 Flowers azure. This book belongs to my Friend Mr. Blom-
field of Norwich. — W. C. 1748." (Note in Cole's copy of
Browne Willis, Mitred Abbeys, i., 161, now in possession of
the Earl of Gainsborough.) These arms, impaled with those
of Reading Abbey, are also given in Coates' Reading, plate
vii., engraved with a portrait of the abbot, from a piece of
stained glass, formerly in Sir John Davis' chapel at Bere Court
near Pangbourne. These are the arms of the family of Cook.
1 Browne Willis, Mitred Abbeys, i., 161. For Leonard Cox
consult Diet, of National Biography, xii., 136. Cox's pre
face referred to is printed in Coates' Reading. The whole is
interesting, but it is too long to quote here. It may be gathered
that Cox had been a protege' of the abbot, who bestowed much
care in advancing the interest of promising youths, and that
Greek was taught as well as Latin in " your grammar schole,

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 127
A letter written by Cook to the university
in Oxford in 1530 is evidence of the abbot's
intelligent zeal for the Catholic religion, which
at that time was being attacked by the new
heresies springing up on all sides. Among the
monks of Reading abbey was one Dom John
Holyman, "a most stout champion in his
preachings and writings against the Lutherans,"
who, "desirous of a stricter life had resigned
his fellowship at New College, Oxford, and
taken the cowl at Reading Abbey." When
Holyman was to receive the doctorate, Abbot
Cook asked that he might be excused 1 from
lecturing before the university, as the custom
was, so that he might preach in London,
where there was greater need of such a man,
seeing that the city was already infected with
founded by your antecessours in this your towne of Redynge."
It may be worth while to mention here that in the years 1499
and 1500 a Greek, one John Serbopoulos, of Constantinople,
was copying Greek MSS. in Reading. Two of these thick
folios written on vellum now form MSS. 23 and 24 in the
library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. They were among
Grocyn's books, and came to the college through the instru
mentality of John Claymond, who was known and patronised by
Abbot Bere, of Glastonbury. Grocyn himself was taught Greek
by William Sellyng, Prior of Christ Church, Canterbury (see
Downside Review, December, 1894).

128 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
Lutheranism, and where the great popularity
which Holyman already enjoyed brought
crowds to hear him whenever he appeared
in the pulpit at St. Paul's.
On the visitation of Reading Abbey by Doc
tor London in 1535, the report was favourable
as to the state of discipline. " They have,"
writes the Doctor, " a good lecture in Scripture
daily read in their chapter-house both in Eng
lish and Latin, to which is good resort, and the
abbot is at it himself."1 It is possible that at
this time in the visitors' injunctions as in their
report Reading was lightly treated. It must
have been known to them, as it evidently was
to Crumwell, that the abbot was in high favour
with the king.
At any rate this circumstance will explain
the sharpness of a correspondence which took
place at this time between Shaxton, Bishop
of Salisbury, in which diocese Reading was
situated, and Crumwell. The latter takes up
the very unusual position as defender of an
abbot, and administers a sharp reproof to
1 Wright, p. 226.

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 129
the bishop for his meddlesome interference
in matters in which, as Crumwell tells him
plainly, he has no concern beyond a desire
to obtain preferment for an unworthy de
pendent of his own.
It appears that the lecturer in scripture at
the abbey was one Dom Roger London, a
monk of the house. In the usual encourage
ment given to tale-bearing at this time, some
discontented religious had delated their teacher
to Bishop Shaxton as guilty of heresy. "The
matters were no trifles," says Shaxton, .himself
at that time a strong supporter of Lutheranism ;
and the four points of suggested heresy cer
tainly run counter to the teaching of the
German doctor. Shaxton examined him per
sonally, "as favourably as I could do," he
writes, "and found him a man of very small
knowledge and of worse judgment." In the
discussion which followed the bishop failed to
bring the monk to his mind, and this deter
mined him to procure the appointment of a
man after his own heart, one Richard Cobbes,
who had been a priest and canon, but who
was then "a married man and degraded."
9

130 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
Shaxton applied to Crumwell for the appoint
ment of Cobbes as lecturer to the monks in
Dom Roger London's place "with stipend
and commons " at the expense of the monas
tery.1 Crumwell, on receipt of the bishop's letter,
wrote to the abbot complaining that " the
divinity lecture had not been read in the abbey
as it ought to have been," and recommending
Cobbes for the post of lecturer. Abbot Cook
replied that he had already a fully qualified
teacher, " a bachelor of divinity and brother
of the house, who, by the judgment of
others " better able to judge than himself,
was "very learned in both divinity and
humanities, profitting the brethren both in
the Latin tongue and in Holy Scripture."
He concludes by pointing out that this teacher
read his lecture at far less charge than a
stranger would do, and offers him to be ex
amined by any whom Crumwell might appoint.
As to the bishop's nominee, the abbot points
out the condition of the man, and naturally
1 Gairdner, Calendar, xiii., i., No. 143 (Jan. 26th, the Abbot of
Reading to Crumwell).

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 131
declares him to be "a most dangerous man" to
hold such a position in the monastery. Under
these circumstances Abbot Cook refused to
admit Cobbes into his house, and continued
his monk, Dom Roger London, in the lecture
ship. Finding that he had not got his way, Shax
ton at once proceeded to inhibit the monk from
reading at Reading, and put a stop to the
lectures altogether. The bishop had evidently
expected that Crumwell would out of hand
have appointed Cobbes to the post on his first
representation; "the which thing, if it had
come to pass, so should I not have needed to
have inhibited the said monk his reading ; but
I bare with him," he writes, "to say his creed,
so long as there was hope to have another
reader there. But when my expectation was
frustrated , in that behalf, then was I driven to
do that which I was loathe to do and which,
nevertheless, I was bound to do."
No one could have been more in sympathy
with Shaxton's views on this matter than
Crumwell. With the exception of the Arch
bishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of

132 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
Worcester — that is, Cranmer, and Latimer — no
one was more according to the minister's mind
in religious matters than Bishop Shaxton ; for
all of them were true Lutherans at heart.
Two of these prelates, indeed, continued
honest in the year 1539 when brought face
to face with the king's " Six Articles," which
extinguished the immediate hopes of the
Lutherans in England. They resigned their
sees, whilst Cranmer, in accordance with his
guiding principle, sacrificed his convictions
and held to his archiepiscopal office.
In the matter of the Reading lectureship
Shaxton had counted that his ground was
safe ; and so indeed it was, up to the one
point of that personal caprice which, through
out his reign, Henry maintained as the most
cherished point of his royal prerogative.
Whatever be the cause or explanation of the
bishop's failure in this matter, one thing is
clear: Henry had a real affection for the
Abbot of Reading, so far as his affection could
go, and used, as the contemporary libeller re
ports, to call him familiarly "his own abbot."
Shaxton was intent on doing his duty as a

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 133
good pastor of sound Lutheran principles.
But Crumwell had that all-determining and all-
varying factor to consider, the king's fancy.
He accordingly wrote to the abbot to tell him
that he need not pay any attention to the
Bishop of Salisbury's inhibition. " I," writes
Shaxton on hearing of this, " could not obtain
so much of you by word or writing to have
your pleasure, and the Abbot of Reading could
out of hand get and obtain your letters to
hinder me in my right proceeding towards his
just correction." Beyond this, not merely was
the bishop's action set aside, but he had to
submit to such a lecture from the king's vicar-
general as may have decided him to resign his
office when a few months later the " Six Arti
cles " came to be imposed by the king and it
was seen that the day for Lutheranism in Eng
land had not yet dawned.
It will be sufficient here to quote .the conclu
sion of Crumwell's letter, which dealt expressly
with the matter in hand. " As for the Abbot
of Reading and his monk," he writes, "if I
find them as ye say they are, I will order them

134 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
as I think good.1 Ye shall do well to do your
duty ; if you do so ye shall have no cause to
mistrust my friendship. If ye do not, I can
tell that (to) you, and that somewhat after the
plainest sort. To take a controversy out of
your hands into mine I do but mine office.
You meddle further than your office will bear
you, thus roughly to handle me for using of
mine. If ye do so no more I let pass all that
is past." Whatever advantage the Abbot of Reading
derived temporarily, at different conjunctures,
from the king's partiality for him, it was by
this time clear that such favour could be. con
tinued to a man of Abbot Cook's character
only by the sacrifice of principles and convic
tions. According to the writer of the sermon
already quoted, the abbot "could not abide"
the preachers of the new-fangled doctrines then
in vogue, and "called them heretics and knaves
of the new learning." He was also "ever a
1 Ultimately Roger London, the reader complained of by
Shaxton, found his way into the Tower. His name appears in
a list of prisoners there "on the 20th day of November," 1539,
as "Roger London, monk of Reading" (B. Mus. Cott. MS.,
Titus B. i., f. 133). His fate is uncertain.

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 135
great student and setter forth of St. Benet's,
St. Francis', St. Dominic's and St. Augustine's
rules, and said they were rules right holy and
of great perfectness." It was, moreover, recog
nised that discipline was well maintained at
Reading and Colchester no less than at Glas
tonbury ; "these doughty deacons," as the
writer calls the abbots and their monks,
"thought it both heresy and treason to God
to leave matins unsaid, to speak loud in the
cloisters, and to eat eggs on the Friday."1 It
would appear probable that Abbot Cook did
not refuse to take the oath of royal supremacy,
although there can be little doubt that in so
doing he did not intend to separate himself
from the traditional teaching of the Catholic
Church on the question of papal authority.
"He thought to shoot at the king's supre
macy," as the contemporary witness has put
it, and he was apparently charged with saying
' ' that he would pray for the pope's holiness
as long as he lived and would once a week
say mass for him, trusting that by such good
1 R. O. State Papers, Domestic, 1539, 251.

136 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
prayers the pope should rise again and have
the king's highness with all the whole realm
in subjection as he hath had in time past.
And upon a bon voyage would call him pope
as long as he lived."
After a page of abuse, the writer, continues :
" I cannot tell how this prayer will be allowed
among St. Benet's rules, but this I am certain
and sure of, that it standeth flatly against our
Master Christ's rule. . . . What other
thing should the abbat pray for here (as me-
thinketh) but even first and foremost for the
high dishonouring of Almighty God, for the
confusion of our most dread sovereign lord,
king Henry VIII., with his royal successors,
and also for the utter destruction of this most
noble realm of England. Well, I say no more,
but I pray God heartily that the mass be not
abused in the like sort of a great many more in
England which bear as fair faces under their
black cowls and bald crowns as ever did the
abbat of Reading, or any of the other traitors.
I wiss neither the abbat of Reading, the abbat
of Glassenbury, nor the prior \sic\ of Colches
ter, Dr. Holyman, nor Roger London, John

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 137
Rugg, nor Bachelor Giles, blind Moore, nor
Master Manchester, the warden of the friars ;
no, nor yet John Oynyon, the abbat's chief
councillor, was able to prove with ail their
sophistical arguments that the mass was or
dained for any such intent or purpose as the
abbat of Reading used it."
" I fear me, Hugh Cook was master cook
to a great many of that black guard (I mean
black monks), and taught them to dress such
gross dishes as he was always wont to dress,
that he is to say, treason ; but let them all
take heed."
At the time of the great northern rising,
the Abbey of Reading, together with those of
Glastonbury and Colchester, is found on the
list of contributors to the king's expenses in
defeating the rebel forces. Reading itself ap
pears to have had some communication with
Robert Aske, for copies of a letter written by
him, and apparently also his proclamation,
were circulated in the town. Amongst others
who were supposed to be privy to the inten
tions of the insurgent chief was John Eynon, a
priest of the Church of St. Giles, Reading, and

138 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
a special friend of Abbot Cook, Three • years
later this priest was executed with the abbot ;
but it is clear that at the time there was not
even a suggestion of any complicity in the
insurrection on the part of the abbot, as he
presided at the examinations held in December,
1536, as to this matter.1
The first sign of any serious trouble appears
about the close of 1537. The king's proceed
ings, which were distasteful to the nation at
large, naturally gave rise to much criticism and
murmuring. Every overt expression of disap
probation was eagerly watched for and dili
gently inquired into by the royal officials. The
numerous records of examinations as to words
spoken in conversation or in sermons, evidence
the extreme care taken by the government to
crush out the first sparks of popular discontent.
Rumours as to the king's bad health, or, still
more, reports as to his death, were construed
into indications of a treasonable disposition.
In December, 1537, a rumour of this kind that
Henry was dead reached Reading, and Abbot
1 Calendar, xi., 1231.

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 139
Cook wrote to some of his neighbours to tell
them what was reported. This act was laid
to his charge, and Henry acquired a cheap
reputation for magnanimity and clemency by
pardoning "his own abbot" for what was, at
the very worst, but a trifling act of indiscretion.
The libeller thus treats the incident : — " For
think ye that the Abbat of Reading deserved
any less than to be hanged, what time as he
wrote letters of the king's death unto divers
gentlemen in Berkshire, considering in what
a queasy case the realm stood in at that same
season ? For the insurrection that was in the
north country was scarcely yet thoroughly
quieted ; thus began he to stir the coals a novo
and to make a fresh roasting fire, and did
enough, if God had not stretched forth His
helping hand, to set the realm in as great an
uproar as ever it was, and yet the king's
majesty, of his royal clemency, forgave him.
This had been enough to have made this
traitor a true man if there had been any grace
in him."
Circumstances had brought Abbot Cook into
communication with both the other abbots,

140 The last Abbot of Glastonbury .
whose fate was subsequently linked with his
own. In the triennial general chapters of the
Benedictines, in parliament, in convocation
they had frequently met ; and when the more
active measures of persecution devised by
Crumwell made personal intercourse impossible,
a trusty agent was found in the person of a
blind harper named Moore, whose affliction and
musical skill had brought him under the kindly
notice of the king. This staunch friend of the
papal party, whose blindness rendered his
mission unsuspected, travelled about from one
abbey to another, encouraging the imprisoned
monks, bearing letters from house to house,
and, doubtless, finding a safe way of sending off
to Rome the letters which they had written to
the pope and cardinals.
" But now amongst them all let us talk a
word or two of William Moor, the blind
harper. Who would have thought that he
would have consented or concealed any trea
son against the king's majesty ? or who
could have thought that he had had any
power thereto ? Who can muse or marvel
enough to see a blind man for lack of sight

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 141
to grope after treason ? Oh ! Moor, Moor,
hast thou so great a delight and desire to
play the traitor? Is this the mark that blind
men trust to hit perchance ? Hast thou not
heard how the blind eateth many a fly ?
Couldst not thou beware and have kept thy
mouth close together for fear of gnats ?
Hath God endued thee with the excellency
of harping and with other good qualities, to
put unto such a vile use ? Couldst thou
have passed the time with none other, song
but with the harping upon the string of
treason ? Couldst thou not have considered
that the king's grace called thee from the
wallet and the staff to the state of a
gentleman ? Wast thou also learned, and
couldst thou not consider that the end of
treason is eternal damnation ? Couldst thou
not be contented truly to serve thy sovereign
lord king Henry VIII., whom thou before
a great many oughtest and wast most bound
truly to serve ? Couldst not thou at least for
all the benefits received at his grace's hand,
bear towards him thy good will ? Hadst thou
nought else to do but to become a traitorous

142 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
messenger between abbat and abbat ? Had
not the traitorous abbats picked out a pretty
mad messenger of such a blind buzzard as
thou art? Could I blazon thine arms suffi
ciently although I would say more than I have
said ? Could a man paint thee out in thy
colours any otherwise than traitors ought to be
painted ? Shall I call thee William Moor, the
blind harper ? Nay, verily, thou shalt be called
William Moor, the blind traitor. Now, surely,
in my judgment, God did a gracious deed what
time He put out both thine eyes, for what a
traitor by all likelihood wouldst thou have been
if God had lent thee thy sight, seeing thou wast
so willing to grope blindfolded after treason !
When thou becamest a traitorous messenger
between the traitorous abbats, and when thou'
tookest in hand to lead traitors in the trade of
treason, then was verified the sentence of our
Master Christ, which sayeth, When the blind
lead the blind both shall fall into the ditch.
Thou wast blind in thine eyes, and they were
blind in their consciences. Wherefore ye be
all fallen into the ditch, that is to say, into the
high displeasure of God and the king. I wiss,

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 143
Moor, thou wrestest thine harpstrings clean out
of tune, and settest thine harp a note too high
when thou thoughtest to set the bawdy bishop
of Rome above the king's majesty."1
It is evident that in the Benedictine monas
teries of the district as years went on there
were many who, as they came to realise the
true meaning of this new royal supremacy,
made no attempt to dissemble their real opinions
on the matter. The writer so frequently re
ferred to thus expresses his conviction as to
the attitude of the monks : " But like as of late
by God's purveyance a great part of their
religious hoods be already meetly well ripped
from their crafty coats, even so I hope the
residue ofthe like religion shall in like sort not
long remain unripped ; for truly so long as they
be let run at riot thus still in religion, they
think verily that they may play the traitors

1 State Papers, 1539, No. 251, p. 25. "William Moor" ap
pears in a list of prisoners in the Tower, 20th November, 1539
(B. Mus. Cott. MS., Titus B. i., f. 133). Perhaps Moor is the
same person mentioned by Stowe (ed. 1614, p. 582) : " The 1
of July (1540) a Welchman, a minstrel, was hanged and quartered
for singing of songs which were interpreted to be prophecying
against the king."

144 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
by authority. But now his grace seeth well
enough that all was not gold that glittered,
neither all his true subjects that called him lord
and master, namely, of Balaam's asses with
the bald crowns. But I would now heartily
wish," he adds, writing after the execution of
the Abbots of Glastonbury, Colchester and
Reading, " that as many as be of that traitorous
religion [i.e., order] that those abbots were of,
at the next [assizes] may have, their bald
crowns as well shaven as theirs were."
On such suspicions as these the Abbot of
Abingdon was called up to London and ex
amined by Crumwell himself, whilst one of
his monks was removed from the abbey to
Bishop Shaxton's prison, evidently for his
opinions on religious questions of the day,
since he is designated by the Bishop as
"the popish monk." Again one of Crum
well's spies reported his grave doubts as to
Sir Thomas Eliot. It appears that Eliot
had given out that he had himself told
Crumwell that " the Imperator of Almayn
never spoke of the Bishop of Rome but
he raised his bonnet," and that he consorted

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 145
in the country with "the vain-glorious Abbot
of Eynesham," and with Dr. Holyman, evi
dently a relative of Dom John Holyman, the
monk of Reading, and incumbent of " Han-
borough, a mile of Eynesham," who is noted as
"a base priest and privy fautor of the Bishop
of Rome." Moreover, "he was marvellous
familiar," so said the spy, "with the Abbot of
Reading and Doctor London, Warden of New
College, Oxon," a man, it is to be observed,
in every way of different mind from his name
sake, Dr. London, the royal visitor.
A letter from Eliot to Crumwell, in which he
expresses his willingness to give up his popish
books and strives to remove from the mind of
the all-powerful vicar-general of the king the
suspicion that he was " an advancer of the
pompous authority of the Bishop of Rome,"
gives some insight into the nature of his com
munications with the suspected abbots. There
"hath happened," he says, "no little conten
tion betwixt me and such persons as ye have
thought that I especially favoured, even as ye
also did,1 for some laudable qualities which we
1 The writer here evidently refers to the Abbot of Reading in
particular. IO

146 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
supposed to be in them ; but neither they
could persuade me to approve that which both
my faith and reason condemned, nor I could
not dissuade them from the excusing of that

Monogram of Abbot Cook, or Faringdon, from a
contemporary piece of stained glass.

which all the world abhorred. This obstinacy
of both parts relented the great affection be
twixt us and withdrew our familiarity."1
In view of the prize to be won, that is, the
1 Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, ii., ii., p. 229.

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 147
broad acres and other possessions of the great
monastic houses, any very definite enquiry as
to the opinions of the inmates was not at
once pressed home. Crumwell played a wait
ing game. The situation at Reading Abbey is
well described by Dr. London, the visitor and
royal agent in dissolving the religious houses,
in a letter written to Crumwell whilst occupied
in suppressing the Grey Friars' house in the
town. " My lord," he writes of the abbot,
"doubteth my being here very sore, yet I
have not seen him since I came, nor been at
his house, except yesterday to hear mass.
The last time I was here he said, as they all
do, that he was at the king's command, but
loathe be they to come to any free surrender."1
Still Crumwell evidently hesitated to try con
clusions, and so matters remained for another
year until he had obtained his Act of Parlia
ment which provided for the case of a house
"happening to come to the king's highness by
attainder or attainders of treason." By the
autumn of the year 1539 he was prepared for

1 Gairdner, Caletidar, xiii., ii., No. 5.

148 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
the final issue in the case of Reading. We
have no records giving the details of Abbot
Cook's arrest and his conveyance to the Tower.
There is only the ominous entry in Crumwell's
Remembrances early in September : " For pro
ceeding against the abbots of Glaston, Reading
and other in their countries." The Abbot of
Reading seems to have been the first to be
arrested, and there can be no doubt that they
all remained for near two months in the Tower
and were all subjected to the same enquiries.
There is evidence to show that at Reading
many arrests were made when the abbot was
taken. A list of the prisoners in Tower on
November 20th, 1539, includes the following,
all connected with the abbey and town : Roger
London, monk of Reading, Peter Lawrence,
Warden of the Grey Friars at Reading,
Giles Coventry, who was a friar of the same
house, George Constantine, Richard Manches
ter and William Moor, "the blind harper;"1
and in one of Crumwell's Remembrances at
this time there is noted : " Item to proceed
1 B. Mus., Cott. M.S., Titus, B. i., f. 133.

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 149
against the Abbots of Reading, Glaston,
Rugg, Bachyler, London, the Grey Friars
and Heron."
Abbot Cook, like the Abbot of Glastonbury,
underwent examination and practical condem
nation in the Tower before being sent down to
his "country to be tried and executed." What
was the head and chief of his offence we may
take from the testimony of the hostile witness
so freely used.
"It will make many beware to put their
fingers in the fire any more," he says, "either
for the honour of Peter and Paul or for the
right of the Roman Church. No, not for the
pardon of the pope himself, though he would
grant more pardon than all the popes that
ever were have granted. I think, verily, our
mother holy Church of Rome hath not so
great a jewel of her own darling Reynold Poole
as she should have had of these abbats if they
could have conveyed all things cleanly. Could
not our English abbats be contented with Eng
lish forked caps but must look after Romish
cardinal hats also ? Could they not be con
sented with the plain fashion of England but

Facsimile of Abbot Cook's writing, from a letter in the Record Office ("at Redyng
the 26 day of January, byyour dayly bedeman, Hugh Abbat there").

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 151
must counterfeit the crafty cardinality of
Reynold Poole ? Surely they should have
worn their cardinal hats with as much shame
as that papistical traitor, Reynold Poole.
Could not our popish abbats beware of Reynold
Poole, of that bottomless whirlpool, I say,
which is never satiate of treason ? "
Carried down to Reading for the mockery
of justice, called a trial, the abbot and his com
panions could not swerve from their belief and
their faith, but they maintained that this was
not treason against the king. "When these
traitors" says the libeller, "were arraigned at
the bar, although they had confessed before
and written it with their own hands that they
had committed high treason against the king's
majesty, yet they found all the means they
could to go about to try themselves true men,
which was impossible to bring to pass."
The writer's object was not to state the
facts, but to cover the memory of the dead men
with obliquy. Taking the document, however,
as a whole, and bearing in mind the interpreta
tion placed on the word treason at that time,
there is no difficulty in penetrating into his
meaning.

152 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
On November 15th, the same day upon
which Abbot Whiting suffered at Glastonbury,
the Abbot of Reading and two priests, John
Eynon and John Rugg, were brought out to
suffer the death of traitors. Here the same
ghastly scene was enacted as at Glastonbury ;
the stretching on the hurdle, the dragging
through the streets of the town. Abbot Cook,
standing in the space before the gateway of
his abbey, spoke to the people who in great
numbers had gathered to witness the strange
spectacle of the execution of a lord abbot of the
great and powerful monastery of Reading. He
told them of the cause . for which he and his
companions were to die, not fearing openly to
profess that which Henry's laws made it trea
son to hold — fidelity to the see of Rome, which
he went on to point out was but the common
faith of those who had the best right to de
clare the true teaching of the English Church.
" The Abbot of Reading, at the day of his
death lamenting the miserable end that he
was come unto," says our authority, pervert
ing words and deeds to the greater glory of
the king, "confessed before a great sight of

Reading Abbey Gateway.

Face f>. 152.

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 153
people, and said that he might thank these
four privy traitors before named of his sore
fall, as who should say that those three bishops
and the vicar of Croydon had committed no
less treason than he had done. Now, good
Lord for his Passion, who would have thought
that these four holy men would have wrought
in their lifetime such detestable treason?" And
later on, speaking of the three abbots : "God
caused, I say, not only their treason to be
disclosed and come abroad in such a won
derful sort as never was heard of, which were
too long to recite at this time, but also dead
men's treason that long lay hidden under the
ground ; that is to say, the treason of the
old bishop of Canterbury [Warham], the trea
son of the old bishop of St. Asaph [Stan-
dish], the treason of the old vicar of Croydon,
and the treason of the old bishop of London
[Stokesley], which four traitors had concealed
as much treason by their lives' time as any of
these traitors that were put to death.1 There
1 This reference to Warham, Stokesley, &c, shows that what
was in question throughout the proceedings was the papal
versus the royal authority.

154 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
was never a barrel better herring to choose
[among] them all, as it right well appeared by
the Abbat of Reading's confession made at the
day of [execution], who I daresay accused none
of them for malice nor hatred. For the abbat
as heartily loved those holy fathers as ever he
loved any men in his life."
Thus, from the scaffold with the rope round
his neck, and on the verge of eternity, the
venerable abbot gave a witness to the venera
tion traditional in these islands from the
earliest ages for the see of Rome, "in which
the Apostles daily sit, and their blood shows
forth without intermission the glory of God."1
When the abbot had finished, John Eynon,2
the abbot's "chief counsellor," also spoke,
evidently in the same sense, and begged the
prayers of the bystanders for his soul, and

1 In these terms the first council of Aries, in 314, address
Pope St. Silvester. This is the first known official act pro
ceeding from bishops of the British Church.
2 The usual spelling of this name has been Onyon or Oynyon,
but it really was Eynon. It is so spelt in the document already
referred to {Calendar, xi., No. 1231), and also in the accurate
entry of the conviction, to be found on the Controlment Roll,
31 Hen. VIII., m. 28 d. " Recordum attinctionis, &c, Hugonis
abbatis monasterii de Redyng in diet. com. Berks, alias dicti

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 155
the king's forgiveness if in aught he had
offended.1 This over, the sentence of hanging with
its barbarous accessories was carried out upon

Hugonis Cooke, nuper de Redyng in eodem com. Berks.
clerici ; Johannis Eynon nuper de Redyng in com. pred.
clerici ; Johannis Rugge nuper de Redyng in com. Berks.
clerici alias diet. Johannis Rugge nuper de Redyng capellani
pro quibusdam altis proditionibus unde eorum quilibet pro se
indictus fuit, tractus et suspensus."
1 Lt would seem that at the trial some attempt was made to
implicate Eynon in the Pilgrimage of Grace, in connection with
which his name had been mentioned in 1536 ; and this is
doubtless the "treason" which the hostile witness declares that
he not only denied, " but also stoutly and stubbornly withstood
it even to the utmost, evermore finding great fault with justice,
and oftentimes casting his arms abroad, said : 'Alas, is this
justice to destroy a man guiltless ? I take it between God
and my soul that I am as clear in this matter as the child that
was this night born.' Thus he prated and made a work as
though he had not known what the matter had meant, thinking
to have faced it out with a card of ten. And in this sort he
held on even from the time of the arraignment till he came to
the gallows. Marry then, when he saw none other way but
one, his heart began somewhat to relent. Then both he and
his companions, with their ropes about their necks confessed
before all the people that were present that they had committed
high treason against the king's most noble person, but namely
Oynyon, for he. said that he had offended the king's grace in
such sort of treason that it was not expedient to tell thereof.
Wherefore he besought the people not only to pray unto God
for him, but also desired them, or some of them at the least,
to desire the king's grace of his merciful goodness to forgive
it his soul, for else he was sure, as he said, to be damned.

156 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
Abbot Cook and the two priests, John Eynon
and John Rugg.1
The attainder of the abbot, according to the
royal interpretation of the law, placed the
Abbey of Reading and its lands and posses
sions at Henry's disposal. In fact, as in the
case of Glastonbury, on the removal of the
abbot to the Tower in September, 1539, before
either trial or condemnation, the pillage of the
abbey had been commenced. As early as
September 8th Thomas Moyle wrote from
Reading that he, "master Vachell and Mr.
And yet not an hour before a man that had heard him speak
would have thought verily that he had been guiltless of
treason." 1 Eynon was, as before stated, a priest attached to the
church of St. Giles, Reading. John Rugg had formerly held a
prebend at Chichester, but had apparently retired to Reading.
In December, 1531 {Calendar, v.), Rugg writes for his books
to be sent to Reading from Chichester. Another letter, dated
Feb. 3, 1532, from "your abbey-lover Jo. Rugg" shows that
the writer had obtained dispensation for non-residence at
Chichester. Coates {Reading, p. 261), on the authority of
Croke, says that John Rugg was indicted for saying " the king's
highness cannot be Supreme Head of the Church of England."
On being asked " What did you for saving your conscience
when you were sworn to take the king for Supreme Head ? "
Rugg replied, " I added this condition in my mind, to take him
for Supreme Head in temporal things, but not in spiritual
things."

Reading Abbey Ruins.

Face A 157.

Abbot Hugh Cook of Reading. 157
Dean of York " (Layton) had " been through
the inventory of the plate, etc., at the resi
dence" there. " In the house," he said, "there
is a chamber hanged with three pieces of metely
good tapestry. It will serve well for hanging
a mean little chamber in the king's majesty's
house." This is all they think worth keeping
for the royal use. "There is also," the writer
adds, " a chamber hung with six pieces of
verdure with fountains, but it is old and at the
ends of some of them very foul and greasy."
He notes several beds with silk hangings, and
in the church eight pieces of tapestry, "very
goodly " but small, and concludes by saying
that he and his fellows think that the sum of
^20oa year "will serve for pensions for the
monks."1 On September 15th another commissioner,
Richard Pollard, wrote from Reading that he
had dispatched certain goods according to
Crumwell's direction " and part of the stuff
1 R. O. Crumwell Correspondence, xxix., No. 76. In the
" Corporation diary," quoted in Coates' Reading, p. 261, is the
entry "before which said nineteenth of September (1539), the
monastery is suppressed and the abbot is deprived, and after
this suppression all things remain in the king's hands,"

158 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
reserved for the king's majesty's use." "The
whole house and church are," he says, "still
undefaced," and " as for the plate,1 vestments,
copes and hangings, which we have reserved "
to the king's use, they are left in good custody
and are to be at once conveyed to London.
"Thanks be to God," he adds, "everything is
well finished, and every man well contented,
and giveth humble thanks to the king's
1)2
grace.

1 In Pollard's account of the plate of " attainted persons and
places" {Monastic Treasures, Abbotsford Club, p. 38) Reading
is credited with 19J ozs. of gold, 377 ozs. of gilt plate, and 2,660
ozs. of silver. It is also stated that the abbot put "to gage to
Sir W. Luke three gilt bowls of 152 ozs. and six silver bowls of
246 ozs."
2 Wright, 220. Mr. Wright thinks this letter " must refer to
the priory and not to the abbey." A letter from William
Penison, to whom Pollard says he committed the charge "by
indenture," says that on September nth he "received posses
sion of the Abbey of Reading and all the domains which the
late abbot had in his hands at his late going away" (R. O.
Crumwell Correspondence, vol. xxxii., No. 36.) This letter
shows that to William Penison Abbot Cook was late abbot —
in other words, had ceased to hold the office when he was
taken away to the Tower for examination early in September.

159

CHAPTER IX.
The Last Abbot of Colchester.
The Abbot of St. John's, Colchester,
Thomas Marshall,1 writes Browne Willis, "was
one of the three mitred parliamentary abbots
that had courage enough to maintain his
conscience and run the last extremity, being
neither to be prevailed upon by bribery, terror
or any dishonourable motives to come into a
surrender, or subscribe to the king's supre
macy ; on which account, being attainted of
high treason, he suffered death."

1 Thomas Marshall was also called Beche. It may be worth
while here, as some confusion has existed as to the last Abbot of
Colchester, to give the evidence of the Controlment Roll, 31
Hen. VIII., m. 36d., which leaves no room for doubt that Beche
and Marshall are aliases for the same person. " Recordum
attinctionis Thomas Beche nuper de West Donylands, in com.
Essex, clerici, alias dicti Thomas Marshall nuper de eisdem

160 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
Thomas Marshall succeeded Abbot Barton
in June, 1533, and entered upon the cares of
office at a time when religious life was becom
ing almost impossible. At the outset he had
apparently considerable difficulty in obtaining
possession of the temporalities of his abbey.
" I, with the whole consent of my brethren," he
writes to Crumwell, "have sealed four several
obligations for the payment of ,£200 to the
king's use, trusting now by your especial
favour to have restitution of my temporalities
with all other things pertaining to the same.
Unless I have your especial favour and aid
in recovering such rents and dues as are
withdrawn from the monastery of late, and I
not able to recover them by the law, I can
not tell how I shall live in the world, saving
my truth and promises."1
villa et comit, clerici, alias Thomas Beche nuper abbatis nuper
monasterii S. Johannis Bapt. juxta Colcestr., in com. pred. jam
dissolut. alias dicti Thomas Marshall nuper abb. nuper mon. S.
Johis. Colcestr. in com. pred. pro quibusdam altis proditionibus.''
West Donylands was a manor belonging to the abbot, and the
name occurs in exchanges made by the abbot with Chancellor
Audley in 1536 (see Calendar, xi., Nos. 385, 519).
1 R. O. Crumwell Correspondence, vi., f. 145. The temporali
ties were restored on Jan. 23rd, 1534, and on March 30th of this

The last Abbot of Colchester. 16 1
Of the earlier career of Thomas Marshall
little is known except that he, like the majority
of his order in England who were selected by
their superiors for a university course, was sent
to Oxford, where he resided for several years,
and passed through the schools with credit to
himself and his order. During this period he
was probably an inmate of St. Benedict's or
Gloucester Hall, the largest of the three estab
lishments which the Benedictines possessed
in Oxford, and to which the younger religious
of most of the English abbeys were sent to
pursue their higher studies.1
Very shortly after Abbot Marshall's election

same year the new abbot took his seat in the House of Lords. It
has been thought that Marshall is the same Thomas Marshall
who ruled the abbey of Chester until 1530, and is counted as the
twenty-sixth abbot of that house {Monasticon, iv.). Whether,
on his retirement from Chester in favour of the reinstated
abbot, John Birchenshaw, he went to Colchester is uncertain.
If he had been long at this latter monastery it is somewhat
strange that the witnesses against him in 1539 should have
professed to be unacquainted with him until his election.
1 St. Benedict's is now represented by Worcester College ;
Canterbury Hall, destined for the monks of the metropolitan
church, is now merged in Christ Church ; and Trinity College
has succeeded to St. Cuthbert's Hall, the learned home of the
monks of Durham. D.Thomas Marshall, O.S.B., supplicated
11

1 62 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
his troubles commenced. At Colchester, as
elsewhere in the country at this period, there
were to be found some only too anxious to win
favour to themselves by carrying reports of the
doings and sayings of their brethren to Crum
well or the king. In April, 1534, a monk of
St. John's complained of the "slanderous and
presumptuous " sayings of the sub-prior, " D.
John Francis." This latter monk, according
to Crumwell's informer, had "declared our
sovereign lord the king and his most honour
able council, on the occasion of a new book of
articles, to be all heretics, whereas before he
said they were but schismatics."1 These and
other remarks were quite sufficient to have
brought both the bold monk himself and his
abbot into trouble at a time when the gossip
of the fratry or shaving-house was picked up by
eavesdroppers and carried to court to regale the
ears of the Lord Privy Seal. In this case, how
ever, the report came on the eve of the admini-
for B.D. January 24, 150J ; disputed 3rd June, 151 1 ; admitted
to oppose 19th Oct. ; received the degree of S.T.B. 10th Dec. ;
sued for D.D. and disputed 20th April, 1515. Boase, Register
of the University of Oxford, p. 63.
1 Calendar 1534, Ap. viii.

The last Abbot of Colchester. 163
stration to the monks of Colchester of what
was to be henceforth considered the touchstone
of loyalty, the oath of supremacy. On the 7th
of July, 1534, the oath was offered to the monks
in the chapter house of St. John's, and taken
by Abbot Marshall and sixteen monks, in
cluding Dom John Francis, the subprior com
plained of to Crumwell.
Very little indeed is known about Col
chester or the doings of the abbot from this
time till his arrest in 1539. At the time
of the northern rising, whilst the commis
sioners for gaol-delivery sat at Colchester,
they were invited to dine at the abbey with
the Abbot of St. John's. When they were
at dinner, as Crumwell's informant writes to
him, one Marmaduke Nevill and others came
into the hall. " I asked him," says the
writer, ' How do the traitors in the north ? '
' No traitors, for if ye call us traitors we
will call you heretics.' " Nevill then went
on to say that the king had pardoned them,
or they had not been at Colchester. They
were, he declared, 30,000 well-horsed, and " I
am sure," he said, "my lord abbot will make

164 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
me good cheer ; " and asked why, said,
" Marry, for all the abbeys in England be
beholden to us, for we have set up all the
abbeys again in our country, and though it
were never so late they sang mattins the same
night." He added that in the north they were
" plain fellows," and southern men, though they
"thought as much, durst not utter it."1
Another glimpse of the life led by the Abbot
of Colchester during the few troubled years
of his authority is afforded by a writer of a
slightly subsequent period : —
" Those who can call to mind the cruel
deeds of Henry VIII., the confusion of "things
sacred and profane, and the slaughterings of
which he was the author, will have no difficulty
in recollecting the case of John Beche, Abbat
of Colchester. Excelling many of the abbats
of his day in devotion, piety and learning, the
sad fate of the cardinal (Fisher) and the execu
tion of Sir Thomas More oppressed him with
grief and bitterness. For he had greatly
loved them ; and as he had honoured them
1 Calendar, xi., 13 19.

The last Abbot of Colchester. 165
when living, so, now that they had so gladly
suffered death for the Church's unity, he began
to reverence and venerate them, and often and
much did he utter to that effect, and made his
friends partakers of his grief which the late
events had caused him. And he was in the
habit of extolling the piety, meekness, and
innocence of the late martyrs to those guests
whom he, invited to his table, and who came to
him of their own will, some of whom assented
to his words, while others listened in silence.
There came at length a traitorous guest, a
violator of the sacred rights of hospitality,
who by his words incited the abbat to talk
about the execution of the cardinal and More,
hoping to entrap him in his speech. Thereon
the abbat, who could not be silent on such a
theme spoke indeed in their praise but with
moderation and sparingly, adding at last that
he marvelled what cause of complaint the king
could have found in men so virtuous and
learned, and the greatest ornaments of Church
and State, as to deem them unworthy of longer
life, and to condemn them to a most cruel
death. These words did this false friend carry

1 66 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
away in his traitorous breast, to make them
known in due season to the advisers of the
king. What need of more? The abbat is
led to the same tribunal which had condemned
both Fisher and More, and there received the
like sentence of death ; yea, his punishment
was the more cruel than theirs, for in his case
no part of the sentence was remitted. Thus
he was added as the third to the company of
the two former. But why should I call him
the third, and try to enumerate the English
martyrs of that time, who are past counting?
The writers of our annals mention many by
name, but there were many more whose names
they could not ascertain, whose number is
known to God alone, for whose cause they
died. Yet I hope that some day God will
make known their names and the resting-places
of their bodies, which were in life the dwelling-
places of His Holy Spirit." 1
About the time of the arrest of the Abbots of
Reading and Glastonbury, in September, 1539,
reports were spread as to the approaching dis-
1 B. Mus. Arundel MS., 152, f. 235 d.

The last Abbot of Colchester. 167
solution of St. John's, Colchester. Sir Thomas
Audley, the chancellor, endeavoured to avert
what he thought would be an evil thing for the
county. He had heard the rumours about the
destruction of the two abbeys of St. John's,
Colchester, and St. Osyth's, and, writing to
Crumwell, he begs they may continue, " not, as
they be, religious ; but that the king's majesty
of his goodness to translate them into colleges.
For the which, as I said to you before, his
grace may have of either of them ;£ 1,000,
that is for both ^"2,000, and the gift of the
deans and prebendaries at his own pleasure.
The cause I move this is, first, I consider that
St. John's standeth in his grace's own town at
Colchester, wherein dwell many poor people
who have daily relief of the house. Another
cause, both these houses be in the end of the
shire of Essex, where little hospitality will be
kept if these be dissolved. For as for St.
John's it lacketh water, and Saint Osyth's
standeth in the marshes, not very wholesome,
so that few of reputation, as I think, will keep
continual houses in any of them unless it be a
congregation as there is now. There are also

1 68 The last Abbot of Glastonbury .
twenty houses, great and small, dissolved in
the shire of Essex already." Audley then goes
on to protest that he only asks for the common
good, and can get no advantage himself by the
houses being allowed to continue, and con
cludes by offering Crumwell ,£200 for himself
if he can persuade the king to grant his re
quest.1 The circumstances attending Abbot Mar
shall's arrest are unknown, but by the begin-
ing of November, 1539, he was certainly in the
Tower. On the ist of that month Edmund
Crowman, who had been his servant ever since
he had been abbot, was under examination.
All that was apparently extracted from this
witness was that a year before the abbot had
given him certain plate to take care of and
" ^40 in a coser."2
The abbot's chaplain was also interrogated as
to any words he had heard the abbot speak
against the king at any time, but little informa
tion was elicited from him. The most impor-

1 Wright, p. 246.
2 R. O. Crumwell Correspondence, xxxviii., No. 42.

The last Abbot of ColcJiester. 169
tant piece of evidence is a document, which, as
it contains declarations as to Abbot Marshall's
opinions upon several important matters, and
as it is almost the only record of the examina
tions of witnesses against any of the three
abbots, and gives a sample of the questions on
which all these examinations in the Tower
concerning treason must have turned, may here
be given as nearly as possible in the original
form. Interrogatories ministered unto Robert Rowse, mercer,
of Colchester, 4'° Novembris anno regni Henrici octavi
tricesimo primo (1539). Ad primam, the said Rowse
sworne upon the Evangel, and sayeth that he hath
known the Abbat of Colchester the space of six years at
midsummer last past or thereabout, about which time
the said  was elected abbat.1 And within a sen
night after or thereabout this examinant sent unto the
said abbat a dish of bass (baces) and a pottle of wine to
the welcome. Upon the which present the said abbat
did send for the examinant to dine with him upon a
Friday, at which time they were first acquainted, and
since was divers times in his company and familiar with
him unto a fortnight before the feast of All Hallows was
two years past. — Robert Rowse.
2. Ad secundam, he sayeth that the principal cause
why that he did leave the company of the said abbat
was because that abbat was divers times communing
1 D. Thomas Marshall or Beche was elected June loth, 1533.

170 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
and respuing against the king's majesty's Supremacy.
supremacy and such ordinances as were passed by the
act of Parliament concerning the extinguishment of the
bishop of Rome's usurped authority, saying that the
whole authority was given by Christ unto The whole
Peter and to his successors, bishops of authority
7 r committed
Rome, to bind and to loose, and to grant to Peter.
pardons for sin, and to be chief and supreme head of
the Church throughout all Christian realms immediate
and next unto Christ, and that it was against God's
commandment and His laws that any Against the
temporal prince should be head of the supremacy.
Church. And also he said that the king's highness had
evil counsel that moved him to take on hand to be chief
head of the Church of England and to pull down these
houses of religion which were founded by his grace's
progenitors and many noble men for the service and
honour of God, the commonwealth, and relief of poor
folk, and that the same was both against Against man's
God's law and man's law ; and further- law and God's
more, he said that by means of the pre- •
mises the king and his council were drawn into such an
inordinate covetousness that if all the water in the
Thames were flowing gold and silver it Covetous.
were not able to slake their covetousness, and said a
vengeance of all such councillors. — a vengeance.
Robert Rowse.
3. Ad tertiam, he sayeth that he is not well remem
bered of the year nor of the days that the said abbat had
the foresaid communications because he spoke at divers
times, and specially at such times as he heard that any
such matters were had in use, and furthermore of this
he is well remembered of that at such time as the monks

The last Abbot of Colchester. 171
of Syon, the Bishop of Rochester, and Sir Thomas More
were put to execution, the said abbat would say that he
marvelled greatly of such tyranny as was Tyranny.
used by the king and his council to put such holy men
to death, and further the abbat said that in his opinion
they died holy martyrs and in the right of Died martyrs.
Christ's Church. — Robert Rowse.
4. Ad quartam, he sayeth that the last time that ever
he heard the said abbat have any communication of
such matters was, immediately after that he heard of the
insurrection in the north parts, he sent for this examin
ant to come to sup with him, and in the mean time
that supper was making ready the abbat and the
examinant were walking between the hall and the
garden in a little gallery off the ground, and then and
there the abbat asked of this examinant what news he
heard of the coast ? and this examinant said that he
heard none. Then the abbat said : " Dost you not hear
of the insurrection in the north ? " and Northern
this examinant said " no." " The north- men.
ern lads be up and they begin to take pip in the webe
(sic) and say plainly that they will have no more abbeys
suppressed in their country;" and he said to this
examinant that the northern men were as true subjects
unto the king as anywhere within his realm, and that
they desired nothing of the king but that they might
have delivered unto their hands the Archbishop of
Canterbury, the lord chancellor, and the That these
lord privy seal ; and the abbat said " would lords might
to God that the northern men had them, to the northern
for then (he said) we should have a merry men.
world, for they were three arch-heretics," Arch-heretics.
which term this examinant never heard before ; and so

172 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
then they went to supper, and since this time, which was
as this examinant doth remember a fortnight or three
weeks before the feast of All Saints, was two years. —
Robert Rowse.1
The evidence of Thomas Nuthake, a "phy-
sition," of Colchester, is to the like effect. He
had not, he said, to his knowledge seen or
known Abbot Thomas before his election,
although he had divers times repaired to the
abbey before that time. In reply to the third
question, this doctor "sayeth that concerning
the marriage of queen Anne this examinant
remembers he hath heard the said abbat say
that the reason why the king's highness did
forsake the bishop of Rome was to the intent
that his majesty might be divorced from the
lady dowager and wed queen Anne, and there
fore his grace refused to take the bishop of
Rome for the supreme head of the Church,
and made himself the supreme head."1
Another of the witnesses against the Lord
Abbot of Colchester was a cleric, John Seyn,
1 R. O. State Papers, Dom., 1539, __:_. The marginal notes
copied from the original document, indicate the chief points on
which the examination turned.
1 Ibid., __._.
' 206

Abbot Beche's Pectoral Cross.

The last Abbot of Colchester. 173
who deposed that when he had informed him
of his neighbour, the Abbot of St. Osyth's sur
render of his monastery to the king, he an
swered, " I will not say the king shall never
have my house, but it will be against my will
and against my heart, for I know by my
learning that he cannot take it by right and
law, wherefore in my conscience I cannot be
content, nor he shall never have it with my
heart and will." Whereunto John Seyn, clerk,
answered in this wise : " Beware of such learn
ing as ye learned at Oxenford when ye were
young. Ye would be hanged and ye are
worthy. I will advise you to conform your
self as a true subject, or else you shall hinder
your brethren and also yourself."1
Nothing more is known of Abbot Marshall's
last days, but the fact of his execution as a
traitor on December ist, 1539. The enamelled
pectoral cross of the venerable martyr has been
preserved, and is now in possession of the Lord
Clifford of Chudleigh. On one side it bears the
emblems of the Five Wounds, in the centre the
1 R. O. Crumwell Correspo7idence, xxxviii., No. 41

174 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
Sacred Heart of our Lord, surrounded by the
crown of thorns, above which is the inscription,
" I.N.R.I.," and below it the sacred monogram,
" I.H.S." with the wounded hands and feet of
our Saviour. On the back the instruments
of the Passion are engraved. The following
inscriptions in Latin appear in and about the
cross: " May the Passion of our Lord Jesus
Christ bring us out of sorrow and sadness.
This sign of the cross shall be in the heavens
when our Lord shall come to judgment. Be
hold, O man ! thy Redeemer suffers for thee.
He who will come after me, let him take up his
cross and follow me."

It is curious to observe how frequently in
this world malice defeats its own ends even
when it takes a guise, to some persons appa
rently so attractive, of doing God a service. It
is by a singular fate that the would-be preacher,
who gave himself so much trouble to defame
the three Abbots of Glastonbury, Reading and
Colchester and their companions, in the expec-

Case of Abbot Beche's Pectoral Cross.

The last Abbot of Colchester. 175
tation doubtless of thereby recommending him
self to the king, should have been, after three
centuries and a half of oblivion, the most ex
plicit witness of the cause for which these
venerable men gave up their lives in all the
terrors of as shameful and painful a death as
man could devise.
The writer himself amid the periods which
betoken his unhappy spirit, seems to have been
haunted still with some forebodings that he
was destined to make manifest a truth which it
was the evident design of those in power to
shroud in obscurity. He cannot help being
truculent even at his best ; but the form which
he adopts may well be pardoned for the sake
of the sense. " Is it not to be thought, trow
ye," he says, "that forasmuch as these trusty
traitors have so valiantly jeopardied a joint for
the Bishop of Rome's sake, that his Holiness
will after their hanging canvass them, canonise
them, I would say, for their labours and pains.
It is not to be doubted but his Holiness will
look upon their pains as upon Thomas Becket's,
seeing it is for like matter."
Much has since happened which the writer

176 The last Abbot of Glastonbury.
of these words could not have anticipated. In
God's hands are times and seasons, and He
alone it is Who judges rightly the acts and lives
of men. The words of the wise man fittingly
rise up in the mind as it recalls the story of the
deaths of these holy abbots. " In the sight of
the unwise they seemed to die : and their de
parture was taken for misery, and their going
away from us for utter destruction : but they
are in peace. And though in the sight of men
they suffered torments, their hope is full of
immortality. Afflicted in few things, in many
they shall be well rewarded ; because God has
tried them and found them worthy of Himself.
As gold in the furnace He hath proved them,
and as a victim of a holocaust He hath received
them, and in time there shall be respect had
unto them."

APPENDIX I.
In view of the want of information as to the internal
arrangement of the monasteries on the eve of their sup
pression, caused by the wholesale destruction of docu
ments, and especially as regards the music and church
services, the following paper printed in the Reliquary
(New Series, vol. vi., p. 176) seems of sufficient interest
to be given here.
From the document it may be gathered that at Glas
tonbury there were always three organists : a chief
organist and master of the singing boys, appointed for
life ; and two youths, who in consideration of a musical
education, were bound (after two years' instruction) to
serve as assistant organists for six years. It must be
understood that the chief duties of these organists and
of the singing boys were confined to the masses and
offices chaunted in the chapel of the Blessed Virgin.
These were, of course, not monastic, that is to say, they
were outside of the ordinary conventual life, and were
not followed necessarily by the monks. These services
were evidently carried out with every accessory calcu
lated to call forth popular devotion to the Blessed
Virgin, and there can be little doubt that the sweet
strains of melody heard every day in this special sanc
tuary of the Mother of God attracted thither high and
low, rich and poor, who might find as an ordinary rule
12

178 Appendix.
but little to call them to the more formal and simple
offices daily said by the monks themselves in the high
choir. It is this music in the chapels of Our Blessed Lady in
monasteries apud Brittannos, which calls forth the cen
sures of that occasionally severe and always erratic
moralist Erasmus (Annot. ad 1 Cor. xiv. 26).
We have no means of saying whether on festival days
the monks of Glastonbury themselves used " that de
praved kind of chaunt called faubourdon," though few
persons at the present day will be inclined to see in the
use of what is called " harmonised gregorians" any
great enormity. It is, however, certain that on feasts
and festal days the monastic offices in the " High
Choir" of Glastonbury were accompanied with such
beauty of music as the presence of the singing-school
and the playing upon the organs, under the care of the
chief organist, could give. For the rest the document
will repay a careful perusal, and for those who are
interested in the subject of ecclesiastical music in
England at a time when it was assiduously cultivated,
fhe indications and suggestions which it gives will
be found to possess a high degree of interest. The
spelling of the document has been modernised.
" This indenture made the tenth day of August, the
26th year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King
Henry VIII. (i.e., 1534), between the Right Reverend
Father in God, Richard Whiting, Abbot of the Monas
tery of Our Blessed Lady of Glastonbury and the
Convent of the same, in the county of Somerset, of the
one part, and James Renynger of Glastonbury foresaid,
in the said county, Singingman, of the other part,
witnesseth that the said James Renynger hath cove
nanted and granted and agreed, and by these presents

Appendix. 179
covenants, grants, and agrees to serve the said Reverend
Father and Convent, and their successors in the Monas
tery of Glastonbury foresaid, in his faculty of singing
and playing upon the organs (for the) term of his life
as well in (the) daily services of Our Lady kept in the
chapel of Our Blessed Lady in Glastonbury foresaid,
as daily mattins, masses, evensongs, compline, anthems
and all other divine services as hath been accustomably
used to be sung in the said chapel of Our Blessed Lady
of Glastonbury before the time of these covenants. And
to do service in singing and playing upon the organs in
the high choir of Glastonbury foresaid on all and all
manner such feasts and festival days as hath been in
times past used and accustomed there.
" And in likewise to serve the said Reverend Father
and his successors with songs and playing on instruments
of music as in the times of Christmas and other seasons,
as hath been heretofore used and accustomed and at any
other time or times when the said James Renynger
shall be thereunto required by the said Reverend
Father, his successor or assigns. And further the said
James Renynger covenants, grants and agrees to in
struct and teach six children always at the pleasure
of the said Reverend Father or his successors for the
chapel of Our Blessed Lady in Glastonbury, sufficiently,
lawfully and melodiously with all his diligence in prick-
song and descant ; of the which six children, two of
them yearly to be sufficiently instructed and taught by
the said James Renynger in playing on the organs for
the space of two years ; the said children to be always
chosen at the pleasure of the said Reverend Father and
his successors which he or they shall think to be most
apt thereto, so that the friends of the two children will
be bound in sufficient bonds that the said two children

1 80 Appendix.
and any of them shall serve the said Reverend Father
and his successors in singing and playing on the organs
daily in the said chapel of Our Lady and high choir of
the Monastery of Glastonbury aforesaid, and other
times of the year in manner and form as before re
hearsed, for the space of six years next ensuing the said
two years of their teaching in singing and playing.
And the said Reverend Father and his successors shall
find the said James Renynger clavicords to teach the
said two children to play upon, for the which service well
and truly done the said Reverend Father and Convent
covenants and grants to the said James Renynger dur
ing his life as well in sickness as in health ten pounds
of lawful money of England, as well for his stipend as for
his meat and drink, at four principal times of the year in
equal portions at the Right Reverend Father's chequer
of receipt in Glastonbury to be taken and received,
and also once in every year his livery gown or else thir
teen shillings and fourpence in money for the said gown,
always at the pleasure and election of the said Reverend
Father and his successors : also two loads of wood
brought home to the said James Renynger's house or
chamber (and his house rent free, or else thirteen
shillings and fourpence a year for it). Always (suppos
ing) that if it happen the said James Renynger be taken
up by virtue of any of the King's commissions, or by
any authority of his, to serve his grace, that if the same
James Renynger come to Glastonbury again within one
year and one day the next following, and so from thence
forth do his diligent service in singing and playing on
the organs, and teaching children at all times and in
everything accordingly in manner and form as is before
rehearsed, that then he should have his perpetuity again
without any interruption or let ; and also if it happen

Appendix. 1 8 1
the said James Renynger does not do his diligence in
teaching and instructing the said six children in singing
and playing, as is before rehearsed, to the pleasure of
the said Reverend Father or his successors, or else if it
happen that the said James be sick or aged so that he
cannot well and diligently instruct and teach the said
children, then it shall be lawful to the said Reverend
Father and his successors as Abbots, of -the said ten
pounds (to deduct) for the teaching and instructing of
the said six children yearly 105s. 4d.
"In witness whereof to the one part of these present
indentures remaining with the said James Renynger, the
aforesaid Reverend Father, Richard Whityng, Abbot of
the foresaid Monastery of Glastonbury, and Convent of
the same have put their convent seal and to the other
part, remaining with the said foresaid Reverend Father
and Convent, the foresaid James Renynger has put his
seal. " Given at Glastonbury aforesaid the day above
said."

182

APPENDIX II.
The following is a translation of an old paper kept
with the pectoral cross of the last Abbot of Colchester.
" This gold and enamelled cross belonged to Abbot John
Beche, last superior of the Benedictine Abbey of St.
John's, Colchester, in the county of Suffolk in England.
He was elected Abbot in 1523, and refused, at the same
time as the Abbots of Glastonbury and Reading, the act
by which Henry VIII., King of England, was declared
head of the Church, or to resign to his Majesty the
property of his abbey. For this reason he was con
victed of treason, and hanged in the said town of
Colchester on December 1, 1539.
"This cross was preserved in the Mannock family,
whose seat was in the neighbourhood of Colchester,
up to the time of the last baronet, Sir George Mannock,
who gave it to the English Benedictine nuns then at
Brussels, and since settled in Winchester, where two of
his sisters were nuns. About the year 1788, the cross
was given by the abbess of that community to the late
Mr. Weld, whose aunt had long lived among them."
In this account there are certain inaccuracies which,
however, do not affect the truth of the tradition as to
the cross. The Mannocks' family seat was Gifford
Hall, not far from Colchester and in the county of
Suffolk. The Mannocks never lost the Catholic faith,

Appendix. 183
and at least four members of the family were professed
among the English Benedictine nuns of Brussels in
the last century. One of these, Dame Etheldreda
Mannock, was Abbess from 1762 to 1773. Three of
the nuns were sisters to Sir George Mannock, who
presented Abbot Beche's cross to the community.
The Abbess, Etheldreda Mannock, was succeeded in
her office by Dame Mary Ursula Pigott — a name,
like that of Mannock, well-known in the English Bene
dictine Fasti of the last century, and to some persons,
perhaps, through the once well-known Catholic counsel,
Nathaniel Pigott, of Whitton, for whose family the
poet Pope, a near neighbour, entertained a high regard.
It was this Abbess who gave the cross to Mr. Weld.
During the office of Lady Abbess Pigott, the com
munity were forced by the Revolution to leave Brussels,
and settled at Winchester, whence in 1857 they removed
to their present abbey at East Bergholt, near Colchester.
From the Welds the cross passed through Cardinal
Weld to his only daughter, Lady Clifford. It after
wards came into the possession of her son, the Hon.
and Right Reverend William Clifford, third Bishop
of Clifton, at whose decease it passed into the hands
of his nephew, the present Lord Clifford of Chudleigh,
to whose kindness I am indebted for these details and
the photographs of the cross reproduced in these pages.

Erratum.^P. 116, note, for line 7 and 8 read: "the letters of
Russell and Pollard state that the abbot was executed on the Tor
hill, the Roman editor of Sander 'uses only a general expression,"
&c.

INDEX.

Abbeys of England, ecclesiastical position of, 3 ; _ great good to the
people, 161.
Abbot, position of a parliamentary, 39, 55.
Abbots refuse to surrender, 87, 173 ; proposed legal process against,
95 ; cause of their deaths the supremacy question, 175.
Abingdon, Abbot of, examined as to opinions, 144 ; monk of, in prison,
144.
Aidan, St., 7.
Aldhelm, St., 2.
Almshouse established by Abbot Bere, 24.
Altar, the silver, at Glastonbury, 35.
Apostles, the preaching of, in England, 5.
Aprice, John, the royal visitor, 65.
Arimathea, St. Joseph of, legends as to, 6.
Aries, British bishops at, 154.
Arthur, King, 5.
Arthur, John, see Thorne, John.
Aske, Robert, his letters to Reading, 137.
Athelney Abbey, fined, 27 ; method by which surrender of, was
secured, 85.
Attainder, of abbots, 94, 95, 96, 102 ; effect of, as to monastic
property, 147.
Audley, Sir Thomas, pleads for Colchester, 167.
Augustine, St., preaching of, 4.
Avalon, 8.
Bachyler, (cf. Giles, Bachelor) proceedings against, 137, 149.
Barton, Abbot of Colchester, 160.
Batcombe, Parish Church of, 70.
Bath, 119.

1 86 Index.
Bath Abbey, 15.
Battle Abbey, 3.
Beche, John, Abbot of Colchester, 160; not long at Colchester, 161,
note; at Oxford, 161 ; his piety and learning, 164; his distress
at the deaths of Fisher and More, 165, 171 ; in the Tower, 168 ;
examination of witnesses against, 169 ; his loyalty to authority of
the Pope, 170; his opinion of Cranmer, &c, 171 ; his opinion on
the divorce question, 172; his refusal to surrender of, 173!
his pectoral cross, 171, 174, 182, seqq.
Becket, St. Thomas, his cause same as that of abbots, 176 ; his Life
found at Glastonbury, 90.
Beneall, Richard, monk of Glastonbury, 37.
Benedictine Order, loyalty of, to Holy See, 144 ; colleges of, at Ox
ford, 161.
Benen, St., and Glastonbury, 7 ; Church of, at Glastonbury, 24.
Benet Biscop, St., 7.
Benet, Dom John, subprior of Glastonbury, 33.
Bere, Blessed Richard, 16.
Bere, Abbot of Glastonbury, 17, 127, note ; installed as abbot, 21 ; his
administration, 24; his buildings, 24, 34; his learning, 25 ; en
tertains Henry VII., 23 ; his embassy to the pope, 26 ; his death,
31 ; his tomb, 34; character of, 23.
Bergholt, East, Benedictine Abbey at, 183.
Berkeley, Maurice, Crumwell's requests for, 71.
Birkenshaw, John, Abbot of Chester, 161, note.
Bishops, the, under Henry VIII., 44.
Blessed Virgin, Services in Chapel of, at Glastonbury, 178.
Boisil, St., 7.
Bridgewater, 119.
Bristol merchants and Glastonbury memorials, 12.
Bristol, St. Augustine's Abbey at, 66.
British bishops and Rome, 154.
British Christianity, evidences of, at Glastonbury, 5.
British Church at Glastonbury, 6.
Bruges, Franciscan convent at, 16.
Brussels, Benedictine nuns at, 182.
Bruton, Bishop Gilbert, Abbot of, blesses Abbot Whiting, 38.
Bruton Abbey, Dr. Layton on religious life at, 66.
Brynstan, Friar John, preaches at Glastonbury, 9, 72.
Buckingham, Duke of, 19 ; position of, in west country, 57.
Burnet, on the condemnation of the three abbots, 100.

Index. 187
Gedwalla, King, his journey to Rome, 9.
Cambridge University, Abbot Whiting at, 18, 30.
Camerarius, the, duties of, 30.
Canterbury, 4.
„ Archbishop of, position of, 56.
Chair, the Glastonbury, 60, 118, note.
Chester, Abbot of, becomes Abbot of Colchester, 161, note.
Cistercian movement, abbeys founded during, 3.
Civil commotions, demoralising effect of, 18.
Clarke, Thomas, 73.
Claymond, John, 127, note.
Cleeve Abbey, fined by Henry VII., 27.
Clergy in sixteenth century, the, 43.
Clerke, Dom Robert, sacrist at Glastonbury, 31.
Clifford, Lord, present possessor of Abbot Beche's cross, 183.
Cobbes, Richard, 129, seqq.
Colchester, Abbey of, difficulties as to temporalities, 160 ; oath of
supremacy administered at, 163 ; gateway of, 167 ; reported dis
solution of, 167.
Colchester, Abbot of, see Beche.
Coliner, Henry, prior of Glastonbury, 31.
Collier, his account of condemnation of abbots, 100. '
Compromissum, election of Abbot Whiting by, 32.
Cook, Abbot Hugh, of Reading, his origin, 123, 124 ; his arms, 124;
his monogram, 146; his signature, 150; his alternative name of
Faringdon, 125, note; his election as abbot, 125; affection of
Henry VIII. for, 128, 132, 139; his reports about the king's death,
139 ; his difficulties with Bishop Shaxton, 129 seqq. ; his detesta
tion of new doctrines, 134; his loyalty to holy see, 145; on the
royal supremacy, 49, 135, 152, seqq. ; holds examination on trea
sonable correspondence, 138; his suspicion of Dr. London, 147;
his treason is really his loyalty to Rome, 49, 137, 149, 151 ; ex
amination in the Tower, 148 ; his condemnation in the Tower, 96,
149 ; his unwillingness to surrender his abbey, 147 ; date of his
martyrdom, 152 ; his speech at his execution, 152 ; testimony as
to martyrdom, 122.
Cornish insurgents, 21.
Cornish, Dr. Thomas, Bishop of Tinos, ordains Abbot Whiting, 28.
Counter, the, supposed trial of abbots in, 96.
Coventry, Giles, grey friar of Reading, 148.
Cox, Leonard, 126.

1 88 Index.
Cranmer, Archbishop, his Lutheran opinions, 132; a heretic, 171.
Crowland, 4.
Crowman, Edmund, servant of Abbot Beche, 168.
Croydon, the vicar of, 153.
Crumwell, Thomas, Wolsey's advice to, 43 ; advancement of, 45 ; his
views as to Glastonbury, 73 ; defective records of the last years of
his administration, 82 ; denies any intention of a general dissolu
tion, 83 ; his determination to proceed against Abbot Whiting, 87 ;
his Remembrances, 94, 98, 99, 102, 149 ; condemns the abbots,
96; Abbot Beche's opinion about, 171.
Cunthorpe, dean of Wells, entertains Henry VII., 23.
Danes, ravages of the, 7, 9.
David, St., and Glastonbury, J.
Dissolution of monasteries, the general, 82 ; royal intention of,
denied, 83.
Divorce, the, 46 ; a book upon, found among Abbot Whiting's effects,
90-94 ; Abbot Beche on, 172.
Doulting, 2.
Dunstan, St., 9 ; his dream as to Glastonbury, 10 ; monastic revival
under, n.
Durham, Liber vita of, 8.
Edgar, king, his chapel at Glastonbury, 34.
Election of abbots, form of, 3 1 seqq.
Eliot, Sir Thomas, suspected of popish opinions, 144, 145.
Elphege, St., 11.
Erasmus, and Abbot Bere, 25 ; on music in English monasteries, 178.
Ethelwold, St., II.
Evesham Abbey, 4.
Exmew, Blessed William, 19.
Eynesham, Abbot of, 145.
Eynon, John, 103, note, 137, 152, 154; right spelling of name, 154,
note ; his declaration as to the papal supremacy, 155, note.
Faringdon, Abbot, see Cook.
Faubourdon music at Glastonbury, 178.
Felons, the abbots put with condemned, 112.
Fisher, Blessed John, 19, 47, 95, 101, 164, 171.
Fitz James, Nicholas, 67, 108.
Ford Abbey, fined by Henry VII., 27.

Index. 189

Forrest, Blessed John, 47, 123.
Fountains Abbey, 3.
Fox, John, the martyrologist, 17.
Fox, Bishop of Bath and Wells, 20.
Francis, Dom John, monk of Colchester, 162.
Gerson, John, 51.
Gifford Hall, 182.
Gildas, St., and Glastonbury, 7.
Giles, Bachelor, 137, 149.
Glastonbury, Dom John, cellarer ofthe abbey, 33.
Glastonbury, British Church at, 6 ; St. Benen's Church at, 7 ; St.
John's Church at, 26 ; Tor Hill at, 2, 116, 117.
Glastonbury Abbey, unique character of, 3, seqq. ; legends of, 8, 12 ;
_ Roma secunda, 12 ; pilgrimages to, 12 ; Henry VII. at, 22, 25 ;
school at, 16 ; musical training at, 177, seqq. ; number of monks
a', 31. 47; love of monks for tradition of, 118, note; magnifi
cence of the buildings at, 106 ; the great church of, 34 ; the relig
ious services at, 177 ; character ofthe religious life at, 66, note;
position of an abbot of, 39, 56 ; abbot's house at, 57 ; abbot's
, garden at, 76 ; supremacy oath, taken at, 47 ; royal injunctions
unworkable at, 68 ; views on king's policy at, 73 ; coming dissolu
tion of, 82 ; last undissolved house in Somerset, 85 ; final measures
¦ against, 87; plate at, 88, 93; the great sapphire of, 88, note;
ransacked for plate, 91 ; dissolution of, 91, 93 ; Crumwell's note
as to plate, 102; the chair belonging to, 60, 118, note ; proposed
restoration of, in Mary's reign, 120.
Greek, knowledge of, at Glastonbury, 25 ; at Reading, 127,
Grey Friars at Reading, proceedings against, 149.
Grocyn, 127, note.
Hanborough, 145.
Hearne, the antiquary, 16.
Henry VII., insurgents against, 21 ; visits Glastonbury, 21, 25.
Henry VIII., early reputation of, 48; general character of, 43 ; his
spiritual headship not understood, 48, 49, 155, 156, note;
object of royal injunctions to monasteries, 65 ; his jealousy for
royal prerogatives, 132; reports as to death of, 138; his breach
with Rome on the divorce question, 172.

190 Index.
Hinton, Charterhouse, 85, 101.
Home, Thomas, Abbot Whiting's servant, 105.
Horner, Thomas, 108.
Holyman, Dom John, monk of Reading, 127, 136.
Holyman, Dr., rector of Hanborough, 145.
Houghton, Blessed John, 19.
Ilchester, 119.
Ina, king, 5, 7 ; his journey to Rome, 9.
Indractus, the hermit, 7.
Injunctions, object of the royal, 65 ; unworkable in practice, 67.
James, Roger, subtreasurer of Glastonbury, 92, 113, 118.
Jurisdiction, suspension of abbatial, 68.
Jury, functions of, in Tudor times, 107, 108.
King, Oliver, Bishop of Bath and Wells, 22, 28.
Latimer, Bishop, 123 ; his Lutheran views, 132.
Lawrence, Peter, warden of the Grey Friars, Reading, in Tower, 148.
Layton, Dr. Richard, royal visitor at Glastonbury, 65, 66, 103 ; his
testimony to the religious life at Glastonbury, 66 ; retracts his
praise, 88 ; suspends the abbot's jurisdiction, 69 ; arrests the
Abbot of Glastonbury, 88 ; on spoils of Reading Abbey, 157.
Legh, Thomas, the royal visitor, 65.
Leland, the antiquary, on the Glastonbury library, 62 ; on abbot
W'hiting, 63, note.
Library, the, at Glastonbury, 62.
London, Dr., royal visitor at Reading, 128, 147.
London, Dom Roger, monk of Reading, 129, 134 and note, 136 ; in
Tower, 148 ; proceedings against, 149.
Loretto, B. V. M. of, chapel to, at Glastonbury, 34.
Lutheran doctrines, opposed at Reading, 127, 129, 134.
Lyte, John, 75.

Manchester, Richard, friar, 137 ; in Tower, 148.
Mannock, Family of, original possessors of Abbot Beche's pectoral
cross, 182.

Index. 1 9 1

Mannock, Sir George, 183 ; Dame Etheldreda, 183.
Manning, Cardinal, on supreme headship, 50.
Marillac, the Ambassador, 69 ; on Abbot Whiting, 94.
Marshall, Abbot of Colchester, see Beche.
Masbury Camp, view from, I.
Mere, near Glastonbury, criticism of king at, 73.
Monasteries, royal demands on revenues of, 70; strongholds of papal
supremacy, 80 ; suppressed, for the sake of plunder, 53, 170 ; legal
aspect of suppression of, 77 ; royal visitation of, 64 ; object of
royal injunctions to, 65 ; wrecking of the Somerset, 86 ; means of
communication between, 141-143; music and church services in,
177-
Monketon, the Parish Church of, 70.
Monks, Benedictine, loyalty of, to Holy See, 144.
Monks' College, Cambridge, 18, note.
Moore, the blind harper, 137 ; carries communications between monas
teries, 140, 143 ; in Tower, 148 ; his probable execution, 143,
note.
More, Blessed Sir Thomas, a witness to Abbot Whiting's election, 73 ;
his corrody from Glastonbury, 70 ; his advice to Crumwell, 43 ;
refuses supremacy oath, 47, 95 ; his declaration as to papal su
premacy, 51 ; died for Church's unity, 165, 171..
Moyle, 88.
Mucheleney Abbey, fined by Henry VII., 27.
Music at Glastonbury, 178, seqq.
Netley Abbey, 3.
Nevill, Marmaduke, 163.
Nicke, Richard, Bishop of Norwich, 21.
Nobility, the new, character of, 42.
Northwood Park, 71.
Norway, Sigfrid, apostle of, 12.
Nuthake, Thomas, his evidence against Abbot Beche, 172.
Observants, The, 47.
Organists at Glastonbury, The, 177.
Oxford, Abbot Beche takes his degree at, 161.
Oynion, see Eynon.
Pace, Richard, educated by Abbot Bere, 25.

192 Index.
Papal supremacy, foundation of, 51 ; loyalty of Abbot Whiting to, 115,
149; do. of Abbot Cook, 135, 136, 149, 153; Abbot Beche in
favour of, 170 ; abbots died for, 176. '
Parliament did not attaint abbots, 96.
Patrick, St., and Glastonbury, 7.
Paulet, 37, 108.
„ Sir Amyas, 27, 37.
Penison, William, keeper of Reading Abbey, 158, note.
Penny, Thomas, 17.
Perkin Warbeck in Somerset, 22.
Peterborough, 4, 8.
Petre, William, 88, note.
Philip, St., disciples of, at Glastonbury, 5.
Pigott, Dame Mary Ursula, 183 ; Nathaniel, 183.
Pilgrimage of grace, 28 ; connection of Reading with, 137 ; denied by
Eynon, 155,, note; supposed sympathy' with at Colchester, 163,
171.
Pilgrim's Way, the, at Glastonbury, 58.
Plate and jewels at Glastonbury, 88, 102.
Pole, Cardinal, IOI, 147, 151.
Pollard, 38 ; hands over plate of Glastonbury, 93, 106 ; accompanies
Whiting on his last journey, 105; writes about Wells jury, 108,
no, 113; at Reading, 157.
Pope, The, abbots staunch for, 149 ; spiritual prerogatives of, 50 ;
respect for, 144, 145 ; abbots died for, 176.
Porta cceli, the choir arch at Glastonbury called, 35.
Reading, mock trial of Abbot Cook at, 151 ; St. Giles' Church in, 137 ;
Grey Friars at, dissolution of, 147 ; warden of, in Tower, 148 ;
proceedings against, 149.
Reading Abbey, 4; position of, 121 ; teaching at, 126 ; Greek studies
at, 127, note ; strict observance at, 135 ; scripture lectures at, 128
seqq. ; visitation of, 128 ; friends of, suspected, 145 ; suspense at,
147 ; spoils of, 156; ruins of, 157.
Records, defective nature of the, 82.
Remembrances, Crumwell's, 94, 99, 149 ; facsimile of, 98.
Renynger, James, chief organist at Glastonbury, 178, seqq.
Reynolds, Blessed Richard, 19.
Rievaux Abbey, 3.
Roe, Nicholas, 17.

Index. 193
Rome, Henry VIII. throws off spiritual supremacy of, 46 ; Abbot
Whiting's loyalty to, 115 ; Abbot Cook's last testimony to love for,
154 ; Abbot Beche on supremacy of, 170.
Roses, Wars of the, 14 ; effect of, 41.
Rowse, Robert, a witness against Abbot Beche, 169.
Rugg, John, 103, note, 137; formerly prebendary of Chichester, 156,
note; proceedings against, 149; death of, 152, 156; on king's
supreme headship, 156, note.
Saint Osyth's, Chancellor Audeley pleads for, 167.
Sander, Nicholas, on condemnation of abbots, 100 ; interpolation of
his work on The Schism, 102.
Schools, at Glastonbury, 16, seqq., 178, seqq. ; at Reading, 126, seqq.
Selby Abbey, 3.
Sellyng, William, Prior of Canterbury, 127, note.
Selwood, Abbot John, 18 ; death of, 20.
Serbopoulos, John, Greek copyist at Reading, 127.
Sharpham manor house, arrest of Abbot Whiting at, 88 ; remains of the
grange at, 89.
Shaxton, bishop of Salisbury, his Lutheran views, 133; his action in
regard to Reading, 128, seqq. ; his prison, 144.
Shrewsbury Abbey, 4.
Sigfrid, apostle of Norway, 12.
Silvester, Pope, St., British bishops to, 154, note.
Singing school at Glastonbury, 178, seqq.
Somerset, insurgents in, 21 ; punishment of, 27 ; wrecking of monas
teries in, 86.
Spies of Crumwell, 144 ; at Colchester, 162, 165.
Stafford, Edwa,rd, Duke of Buckingham, 19.
Standish, Bishop of St. Asaph, 153.
Stapeldon, Bishop of Exeter, 15.
Stokesley, Bishop, 49 ; loyal to papal authority, 153.
Stourton, Lord, his connection with Glastonbury and Benedictine
Order, 76 and note.
Suppression of monasteries, legal aspect of, 77 ; no law for any general,
78.
Supremacy, the royal, oath of, 47 ; as tended to monasteries, 54 ;
method of regarding it, 49; used to force surrender, 85 ; abbots
condemned for refusing, 100, 152, seqq. ; view taken at Reading
concerning, 135; the touchstone of loyalty, 163; Abbot Beche
against, 170.
Surrender, the forced, of monasteries, 80.
13

1 94 Index.
Sydenham, John, 158.
Taunton, Perkin Warbeck at, 22; Franciscan convent at, 16, note;
St. Margaret's Spital at, 24.
Taunton, Dom John, Precentor of Glastonbury, 34.
Theodore, Archbishop, 4.
Thorne, John, the martyr, 60 ; treasurer of the church at Glastonbury,
92, 113, 118; portrait of, 118.
Tinlern Abbey, 3.
Tor hill, Glastonbury, 2 ; the scene of martyrdom of Abbot Whiting,
116, 117 ; erratum, 184.
Tower, the, Abbot Whiting sent to, 90 ; examinations in, 94 ; Abbot
Cook in, 148 ; prisoners in, 148; condemnation of abbots in, 96,
98, 99 ; secret tribunal in, 102 ; Abbot Beche in, 168.
Treason, suppression of monasteries for supposed, 79, 147 ; meaning of,
in Tudor times, 114, 115. '
Tregonwell, John, 88, note.
Tutton, John, 73.
Visitation of religious houses, the, 64.
Warham, Archbishop, his view as to papal authority, 153.
Waryn, John, election of, as Abbot of Glastonbury, 20.
Watts, John, monk of Glastonbury, 75.
Weld, the Family of, 183.
Wells, 119 ; Henry VII. visits, 23 ; Cathedral of, 57 ; jury assembled
at, 107 ; Abbot Whiting arrives at, 109 ; bishop's palace at, III.
Westminster, position of the abbey, 56 ; crowning place of kings, 4.
Whiting, Richard, Abbot of Glastonbury, early life of, 14, seqq. ;
birthplace of, 15; at Glastonbury school, 17 ; at Cambridge, 19,
30; ordination .of, 28; holds office as chamberlain, 30; his
election as abbot, 31 ; blessed as abbot, 38 ; simple character of
his life, 57, seqq. ; his character, 33, 37 ; his bed, 59 ; his book-
stamps, 61, 62 ; his signature, 71 ; character df his letters, 71 ;
his life at home, 72, 75 ; his watch, 74 ; his garden, 76 ; king's
quarrel with, 80 ; arrest of, 88 ; effects ransacked for evidence, 90 ;
sent to Tower, 90 ; supposed treasons ot, 92, 94 ; real offences of,
93 ; examinations in Tower, 94, 99 ; his condemnation for treason,
96, 102 ; design to lower him, 102 ; indignities offered to him,
104, in; his last journey, 105; date of martyrdom, 113 and
note ; place of martyrdom, 1 16, note.

Index. 195
Whitton, 183.
Wilfrid, Roger, see James Roger.
Williams, Sir John, 88.
Wilton Abbey, 16.
Winchester, 4 ; Benedictine Nuns, at, 182.
Wolsey, Cardinal, makes choice, of Abbot Whiting, 32; his care for
religious observance, 38.
Wrington, 15.
Wulfric, brother to St. Dunstan, n.

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