As far as regarded the predisposing habits and influence of the clergy, matters were not better in Britain than on the Continent, when the disease first reached this country. We have already seen Cardinal Wolsey, the primate of England, publicly accused in Parliament of labouring under the disease. We can, however, wonder the less at the disease attacking such a high dignitary, when we recollect that, according to some writers,[628] there was openly inscribed over the doors of a palace belonging to this prelate—“_Domus Meretricium Domini Cardinalis_.” Polydore Vergil, the sub-collector of the Pope’s revenues in England, speaks, perhaps in exaggerated terms, of the orgies in the residence of Wolsey, by which he allured at first the young King Henry VIII. “Domi suae voluptatum omnium sacrarium fecit quo regem frequenter ducebat. Sermones leporis plenos habebat, etc.”[629] The manners of the inferior dignitaries of the church offered only too close an imitation of those of its primate. The commissioners appointed by Henry VIII. to visit the monasteries of England have recorded a sad, and (even setting aside the influence of prejudice) probably only too true a picture of the moral degeneracy of the great mass of the regular clergy of the time. With some few cheering and honourable exceptions, they found the occupants of most of the monasteries following lives of degraded vice and licentiousness, instead of religious purity and exemplary rectitude. When the visitors received their commissions and instructions, they were despatched into different parts of the kingdom, at the same time, that the monks might have as little warning of their approach as possible. They executed, says the historian Henry,[630] their commissions with zeal and diligence, and made some curious discoveries almost in every house, not much to the honour of its inhabitants. Accounts, he adds, of their proceedings were transmitted by the visitor to the vicar-general, and they contained sufficient materials to render the monasteries completely infamous,—for their gross, absurd superstition, their shameful impositions, their abandoned unnatural incontinency, etc. etc. Some of the old abbots and friars did not attempt to conceal their amours, because they knew it was impossible. The holy father, the prior of Maiden Bradley, assured the visitors that he had only married six of his sons and one of his daughters out of the goods of the priory as yet; but that several more of his children were now growing or grown up, and would soon be marriageable. He produced a dispensation from the Pope, permitting him to keep a mistress; and he asseverated that he took none but young maidens to be his mistresses, the handsomest that he could procure; and when he was disposed to change, he got them individually provided with very good lay husbands.[631] “These be the men” (exclaimed Simon Fish, in one of his celebrated public sermons which he delivered