On the 23d of May parliament was prorogued for a week; on the 30th the lord chancellor informed the peers that his Majesty, with the assistance of the bench of bishops, had come to a conclusion on the Six Articles; which, it was assumed,--from the course possibly which the many debates had taken,--would be acceptable to the two houses. A penal statute would be required to enforce the resolutions; and it was for their lordships to determine the character and the a extent of the punishment which would be necessary. To give room for differences of opinion, two committees were this time appointed,--the first consisting of Cranmer, the Bishops of Ely and St. David's, and Sir William Petre; the other of the Archbishop of York, the Bishops of Durham and Winchester, and Dr. Tregonwell.[465] The separate reports were drawn and presented; the peers accepted the second. The cruel character of the resolutions was attributed, by sound authority, to the especial influence of Gardiner.[466] It was not, in its extreme form, the work of the king, nor did it express his own desires. His opinions on the disputed articles were wholly those contained in the body of the act. He had argued laboriously in their maintenance, and he had himself drawn a sketch for a statute not unlike that which passed into law; but he had added two clauses, from which the bishops contrived to deliver themselves, which, if insisted upon, would have crippled the prosecutions and tied the hands of the Church officials. According to Henry's scheme, the judges would have been bound to deliver in writing to the party accused a copy of the accusation, with the names and depositions of the witnesses; and, if there was but one witness, let his reputation have stood as high as that of any man in the state, it would have been held insufficient for a conviction.[467] [Sidenote: The whip with the six strings.] The slight effort of leniency was not approved by the House of Lords. In spite of Cranmer's unwearied and brave opposition, the harshest penalties which were recommended received the greatest favour; and "the bloody act of the Six Articles," or "the whip with six strings," as it was termed by the Protestants, was the adopted remedy to heal the diseases of England. After a careful preamble, in which the danger of divisions and false opinions, the peril both to the peace of the commonwealth and the souls of those who were ensnared by heresy, were elaborately dwelt upon, the king, the two houses of parliament, and the convocations of the two provinces declared themselves, after a great and long, deliberate and advised disputation, to have adopted the following conclusions:[468]-- [Sidenote: The real presence.]