The most active champion of the King’s cause was also a Minorite, Dr. Nicholas de Burgo, a native of Italy, who enjoyed the patronage of Cardinal Wolsey[769]. The unpopularity of the divorce, among those who were guided by their sentiments rather than by their personal interests, is shown by the treatment he received at Oxford. He was pelted with stones in the street, and the good women of the town would have ‘foyled’ him ‘if their handys might have served their harts’[770]. In retaliation the friar caused about thirty women to be locked up in Bocardo for three days and nights[771]. As we shall see later on, his services did not go unrewarded[772]. The position of Friar Nicholas, however, was exceptional, and his action cannot be regarded as representative of the feelings of the Oxford Convent. The causes which led to the dissolution of the monasteries do not concern us here. The friaries were not included in the Act of 1536 for the abolition of the lesser monasteries; they possessed as a rule no estates except the site on which they were built, and the gains to be derived from their disendowment were perhaps regarded as insufficient compensation for the odium which the measure would necessarily involve. The first blow had already fallen upon the Observant Friars, the fearless champions of the legality of the Queen Katharine’s marriage and of the Papal supremacy. The conventuals were left alone till Henry decided on the general suppression of the religious houses throughout England. The object of the royal party was then to obtain what was called a ‘voluntary’ surrender of their property from the members of each religious community; and among those who had the courage to offer opposition were many houses of Franciscans, ‘with hom,’ writes the Bishop of Dover, ‘in every place I have moche besynes’[773]. But among these we cannot reckon the convent at Oxford. In 1535 Cromwell sent his agent, Layton, and others, to Oxford to reform the University. After abolishing the study of the schoolmen[774], the visitors proceeded to deal with the religious students[775]. For the reform of the monasteries, they were armed with a set of eighty-six articles of inquiry and twenty-five injunctions[776], the real though not avowed object of which was to make monastic life unbearable and so to prepare the way for ‘voluntary’ surrenders[777].