for lack of faith only." Sir Thomas Audley had been one of the first to profit by the plunder of the monasteries. "He had had," as Fuller terms it, "the first cut in the feast of abbey lands." He was also one of those who shared in its final distribution. As a reward for his services as Lord Chancellor--and what those services must have been as "the keeper of the conscience" of such a king as Henry VIII. we need not trouble to inquire--a few more of the suppressed monasteries were granted to him at the general dissolution, among which, at his own earnest suit, was the Abbey of Walden in Essex. Walden was one of the Benedictine houses that had been associated in the early days with Monks', now Buckingham College. Whether the newly-created Lord of Walden regarded himself as inheriting also the Monks' rights and responsibilities in connection with the Cambridge college or not, or whether, being an old man now and infirm and with no male heir, he thought to find some solace for his conscience in the thought of himself as the benefactor and founder of a permanent college, I cannot say. Certain, however, it is that the original statutes of Magdalene College, unlike those of Christ's and John's, exhibit no regard for the New Learning, and are indeed mainly noteworthy for the large powers and discretion which they assign to the Master, and the almost entire freedom of that official from any responsibility to the governing body of Fellows. It was evidently the founder's design to place the College practically under the control of the successive owners of Audley End.