The foul charges of Legh, Layton, and their colleagues had served their turn; many copies of the abstracts of their minutes were made for circulation, several of which are still extant, and amid the odium of these malignant lies the suppression of the monasteries became possible. But it is quite clear that those in power believed in their hearts the reports of the mixed commissions of officials and country gentlemen instead of the egregious tales of Cromwell’s tools. Had the charges made in the first visitation been accepted as true, it is quite impossible to believe that the guilty ones would have been pensioned, as was so frequently the case. Thus it can be proved that out of twenty-seven nuns accused of incontinence seventeen were pensioned. Various Superiors accused by the first visitors of criminal offences were afterwards given high secular preferment in the Church. One of the specially bad cases, if Legh is to be believed, who visited the house on 29 September, 1535, was Chertsey Abbey; he reported that seven were incontinent, four guilty of unnatural sin, and two apostate. The house at that time only consisted of an abbot and fourteen monks, so that there were but two of virtuous life! Two years later Chertsey was surrendered. The fickle King at that time was establishing “King Henry VIII.’s new monastery of Holy Trinity, Bisham,” to consist of an abbot and thirteen Benedictine monks, who were to pray for the King and Queen Jane. To this short-lived new foundation Henry VIII. actually transferred the abbot of Chertsey and his whole convent in their entirety, although Legh two years before had solemnly reported them to be the foulest set of monks that he had anywhere discovered! The King had wit enough to use the lies of his first set of visitors to further his own covetous ends; but he could never have done more than pretend to credit them.