At the end of the fifteenth century there is another political bishop. This was =William Smyth= (1492-1496). He, like several of his successors, was President of Wales, and he was also the founder of Brasenose College, Oxford. Next comes =John Arundel= (1496-1503), and then comes =Geoffry Blythe=, whose rule, commencing in 1503, lasts until 1531, the year when Henry required the clergy to acknowledge him as supreme head of the Church. This period of the dark days before the Reformation must have been one of great difficulty for the bishops, but Blythe seems to have been very popular at Lichfield; he made several attempts to stamp out Lollardism, and has earned for himself an unenviable niche in the house of fame by his inclusion in Fox's "Book of Martyrs" for his holding of the "Court of Heresy." One martyr (a woman) was burned at Coventry, and others were tried and acquitted or condemned to less horrible punishments. On the whole, Blythe seems to have been as gentle as the times would allow him to be. He died in 1531, and escaped the storm which was now to burst. When it had cleared away, many of the old religious landmarks had disappeared; Lichfield Cathedral had lost her sister minster, and had been shorn of much that it valued and was beautiful. After an interval, =Rowland Lee= (1534-1543) was appointed. He had been chaplain to the king, and it was he who officiated at the private marriage of Henry and Anne Boleyn; he was rewarded with the bishopric of Lichfield and Coventry, and was made President of Wales, in which latter appointment he was said to have ruled so wisely that we owe to him the kindly feelings which have ever since existed between the two countries. This work must have kept him much away from the diocese, and it was superintended by two suffragans; but we have it on record that he did his best to save something for the diocese from the wreck of the Reformation; how little he was able to do we shall now see. He also issued to the clergy a set of injunctions, in which the new teaching and ideas are set forth, "that the King's Majesty is only Supreme Head under Chryst in Erthe of this his Churche of England"; that every parish priest shall provide for his church a "Boke of the hole Byble both in Latin and alsoe in Englishe, and lay the same in the Quiere for every man that will loke and read therein"; and other injunctions on prayers and preaching and behaviour, which are not, like the first two, new and startling, but are reminiscences of the ordinances and manners of the past.