Here is what Taine says as to this affair: “The Bishops had received the right of imprisoning without trial laymen suspected of heresy, and the jurisdiction of all crimes, offenses and sins was given to the ecclesiastical tribunals. They burned Lord Cobham alive. With what shamelessness this power was transformed into a vehicle for extortions. A man begins to think when he is thus downtrodden. He asks himself if it is really by divine dispensation that mitred thieves thus practice tyranny and pillage. He wants to know if they themselves practice the regularity that they impose on others, and he learns strange things. Cardinal Wolsey writes to the Pope that both the secular and regular priests were in the habit of committing atrocious crimes, for which, if not in orders, they would have been promptly executed. A priest convicted of incest with the prioress of Kilbourn was condemned to carry a cross in a procession and pay a fine of 3s and 4p. In the reign of Henry VII the gentlemen and farmers of Carnarvonshire laid a complaint accusing the clergy of systematically seducing their wives and daughters. The Holy Father Prior of Maiden Bradley hath but six children, and but one daughter married yet of the goods of the monastery, trusting shortly to marry the rest. The royal visitors found concubines in the secret apartments of the Abbots. At the nunnery of Sion the confessors seduced the nuns and absolved them at the same time. There were convents, Burnett tells us, where all the recluses were found pregnant.”—Taine’s English Literature, 2-18. “Bishop Longland, of Lincoln, about 1521, summons the relatives of the accused, brothers, women and children, and administers the oath. As they have already been prosecuted and have abjured, they must make oath, or they are relapsed, and the fagots await them. Then they denounce their kinsmen and themselves. Three of the accused were charged with passing the night together in reading the scriptures. Several of them at church, at the moment of the Elevation would not say their prayers and remained seated dumb as beasts. A brazier denied the real presence. Six were burnt alive. The children of John Scrivener were themselves obliged to set fire to their father’s funeral pyre. They saw him, bound by an iron chain, with clasped hands, praying amidst the smoke, whilst the flame blackened his skin and destroyed his flesh. Such sights are not forgotten.”—Idem. “At the peril of his life the Englishman obtains some portion of the Bible, which Tyndale had just translated, and hides it and learns it by heart. Tyndale, the translator, was condemned, hunted, in concealment, his mind full of the idea of a speedy death and of the Great God, for whom at last he mounted the funeral pyre.”—Idem, 2-21.