This letter came upon Wolsey as a sudden revelation of his true position. It showed him the reality of all the vague doubts and fears which he had for some time been striving to put from him. He was crushed into abjectness, which he did not even strive to conceal from others. He took the immediate matters of complaint seriously to heart, and wished to annul the appointment of Isabella Jordan, which the king ruled to be unnecessary; on that point he was satisfied with having asserted a principle. But he advised Wolsey to receive no more gifts for his colleges from religious houses, and Wolsey promised not to do so. "Thereby I trust, nor by any other thing hereafter unlawfully taken, your poor cardinal's conscience shall not be spotted, encumbered, or entangled; purposing, with God's help and your gracious favour, so to order the rest of my poor life that it shall appear to your Highness that I love and dread God and also your Majesty." This was a lamentable prostration of the moral authority of the chief churchman in England before the king, and showed Wolsey's weakness. He knew that he had not demeaned himself as befitted his priestly office; and though he may have felt that no man in England had less right than the king to reprove his conduct on moral grounds, still he could not plead that he was above reproach. In the particular matter of which he was accused--extorting money from the religious houses in return for immunities granted in virtue of his legatine power--there is no evidence that Wolsey was guilty. But he could not say that he had a conscience void of offence; he had acted throughout his career as a statesman and a man of the world. If the king chose to hold him up to moral reprobation he had no valid defence to offer. He had disregarded the criticisms of others that he might serve the king more faithfully; but if the king took upon himself the office of critic he had nothing to urge. It was because Henry had taken the measure of churchmen such as Wolsey that he ventured in later times to hold such lofty language in addressing the clergy. Henry was always superior to the weakness of imagining that his own conduct needed any defence, or his own motives any justification.