On one of the first days of the session the speaker and certain members, who had been ordered to accompany him, proceeded to the palace. “Your highness,” they began, “of late much discord, variance, and debate hath arisen, and more and more daily is likely to increase and ensue amongst your subjects, to the great inquietation, vexation, and breach of your peace, of which the chief causes followingly do ensue.”[14] This opening could not fail to excite the king’s attention and the Speaker of the House of Commons began boldly to unroll the long list of the grievances of England. “First, the prelates of your most excellent realm, and the clergy of the same, have in their convocations made many and divers laws without your most royal assent, and without the assent of any of your lay subjects. “And also many of your said subjects, and specially those that be of the poorest sort, be daily called before the said spiritual ordinaries or their commissaries, on the accusement of light and indiscreet persons, and be excommunicated and put to excessive and impostable charges. “The prelates suffer the priests to exact divers sums of money for the sacraments, and sometimes deny the same without the money be first paid. “Also the said spiritual ordinaries do daily confer and give sundry benefices unto certain young folks, calling them their nephews or kinsfolk, being in their minority and within age, not apt nor able to serve the cure of any such benefice ... whereby the said ordinaries accumulate to themselves large sums of money, and the poor silly souls of your people perish without doctrine or any good teaching. “Also a great number of holydays be kept throughout this your realm, upon the which many great, abominable, and execrable vices, idle and wanton sports be used, which holydays might by your majesty be made fewer in number. “And also the said spiritual ordinaries commit divers of your subjects to ward, before they know either the cause of their imprisonment, or the name of their accuser.”[15] Thus far the Commons had confined themselves to questions that had been discussed more than once; they feared to touch upon the subject of heresy before the Defender of the Roman Faith. But there were evangelical men among their number who had been eye-witnesses of the sufferings of the reformed. At the peril, therefore, of offending the king, the Speaker boldly took up the defence of the pretended heretics. “If heresy be ordinarily laid unto the charge of the person accused, the said ordinaries put to them such subtle interrogatories concerning the high mysteries of our faith, as are able quickly to trap a simple unlearned layman. And if any heresy be so confessed in word, yet never committed in thought or deed, they put the said person to make his purgation. And if the party so accused deny the accusation, witnesses of little truth or credence are brought forth for the same, and deliver the party so accused to secular hands.”