Henry Griffin says in his chronicle: "I was well acquainted with all the commissioners; indeed I knew them well; they were very smart men, who understood the value of money, for they had tasted of adversity. I think the priests were the worst of the whole party, although they had a good reputation at the time, but they were wicked, deceitful men. I am sorry to speak thus of my own order, but I speak God's truth." "It is a dreadful undertaking," said Lord Clinton. "Ah! but I have great faith in the tact and judgment of the men I am about to select," retorted Cromwell. Dr. John London was a base tool of Cromwell, and a miserable exponent of the reform movement. He joined Gardiner in burning heretics, was convicted of adultery at Oxford, was pilloried for perjury and died in jail. The other royal agents were also questionable characters. Dean Layton wrote the most disgusting letters to Cromwell. Once he informed his patron that he prayed regularly for him, prefacing this information with the remark, "I will now tell you something to make you laugh." Father Gasquet sums up his view of the commissioners in the words of Edmund Burke: "It is not with much credulity that I listen to any when they speak ill of those whom they are going to plunder. I rather suspect that vices are feigned, or exaggerated, when profit is looked for in the punishment--an enemy is a bad witness; a robber worse." Burke indignantly declares: "The inquiry into the moral character of the religious houses was a mere pretext, a complete delusion, an insidious and predetermined foray of wholesale and heartless plunder." Such are the protests from the defenders of the monasteries even before a hearing is granted. "What," say they, "believe such perjurers, adulterers and gamblers; men forsworn to bring in a bad report; men who were selected because they were worthless characters who could be relied on to return false charges against an institution loved by the people?"