Among all the foul scandals set afloat by the King’s first visitors, and afterwards supported by the discredited Bale, none was worse than that charged against the last abbot of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, John Essex (alias Vokes). Another of the monks, who was incriminated with his superior, was John Digon, the last prior of the house. If the odious charges had been true, it is hardly possible to believe that they would have been pensioned; but recently a strong piece of evidence has unexpectedly been brought to light through Abbot Gasquet drawing attention, in the _Downside Review_, to a small volume published in 1590 by Thomas Twyne, a learned doctor of medicine, containing a Latin tract by his father, John Twyne, the celebrated antiquary. It is entitled _De rebus Albionicis Britannicis atque Anglicis Commentariorum libri duo_. In the introduction we are told that John Twyne, who died in 1581, and left this tract behind him relative to the early antiquities of this island, was in the opinion of competent judges a most learned man. But it is the form in which the treatise is drawn up, and not the actual contents, that is of so much interest from a monastic standpoint. It is cast in the shape of a conversation supposed to be held between Abbot Essex, Prior Digon, and Nicholas Wotton, the first Dean of Canterbury after the ejection of the monks, a man of brilliant gifts. Though the conversation is imaginary, John Twyne tells his son that he had often heard these three men carry on similar learned discussions, and was evidently on terms of intimacy with them. The son entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1560, and this treatise was written for his information when on the eve of proceeding to the University. Had two of these men been odious reprobates, the father could not possibly have held them up to his young son as models of good scholarship. Moreover, he goes out of his way to praise them in no slight terms, telling his son that “above all the many people whom I have ever known I have especially revered two, because in their days they were above all others remarkable for the high character of their morals (_morum gravitatem summam_), and for their remarkable acquaintance with all antiquity; they were, if you know not already, John Vokes and John Digon. The first was the most worthy (_dignissimus_) abbot, and the second the most upright (_integerrimus_) prior of the ancient monastery of St. Augustine.”[A] When the time comes for the writing of a true and fearless Life and Times of Henry VIII. (a monarch who has been aptly dubbed “the professional widower”) by some thorough and conscientious student of history, there can be no reasonable doubt that Canon Dixon’s statement will be amply substantiated when he wrote:--“I am inclined to believe that in the reign of Henry VIII. the monasteries were not worse, but better, than they had been previously, and that they were doing fairly the work for which they had been founded.”