My last and only request shall be, that myself may bear the burden of your Grace's displeasure and it may not touch the innocent souls of those poor Gentlemen, who, as I understand, are in strait imprisonment for my sake. If ever I have found favour in your sight, if ever the name of Ann Bullen hath been pleasing in your ears, let me obtain this last request, I will so leave to trouble your Grace any further, with my earnest prayers to the Trinity, to have your Grace in his good keeping, and to direct you in all your actions. Your most loyal and faithful wife, ANN BULLEN. From my doleful prison in the Tower, The sixth of May, 1536. ACT FOR THE DISSOLUTION OF THE LESSER MONASTERIES (1536). +Source.+--27 Henry VII. cap. 28. (_Statutes of the Realm_, III. 575.) Forasmuch as manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living is daily used and committed among the little and small abbeys, priories, and other religious houses of monks, canons, and nuns, where the congregation of such religious persons is under the number of twelve persons, whereby the governors of such religious houses, and their convent, spoil, destroy, consume, and utterly waste, as well their churches, monasteries, priories, principal houses, farms, granges, lands, tenements, and hereditaments, as the ornaments of their churches, and their goods and chattels, to the high displeasure of Almighty God, slander of good religion, and to the great infamy of the King's highness and the realm, if redress should not be had thereof. And albeit that many continual visitations hath been heretofore had, by the space of two hundred years and more, for an honest and charitable reformation of such unthrifty carnal and abominable living, yet nevertheless little or none amendment hath been hitherto had, but their vicious living shamelessly increases and augments, and by a cursed custom so rooted and infested, that a great multitude of the religious persons in such small houses do rather choose to rove abroad in apostasy, than to conform themselves to the observation of good religion, so that without such small houses be utterly suppressed, and the religious persons therein committed to great and honourable monasteries of religion in this realm, where they may be compelled to live religiously for reformation of their lives, there cannot else be no reformation in this behalf: