First, we begin and make answer to the four and six articles, because upon them dependeth much of the rest. Concerning choosing of councillors, I never have read, heard, or known, that princes' councillors and prelates should be appointed by rude and ignorant common people, nor that they were persons meet, nor of liability to discern and choose meet and sufficient councillors for a prince: how presumptuous then are ye the rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm, and of the least experience, to find fault with your Prince for the electing of his councillors and prelates, and to take upon you contrary to God's law and man's law to rule your prince, whom ye are bound by all laws to obey and serve with both your lives, lands, and all goods, and for no worldly cause to withstand the contrary whereof you like traitors and rebels have attempted, and not like true subjects as ye name yourselves. As to the suppression of religious houses, monasteries, we will that ye and all our subjects should well know that this is granted us by all the nobles spiritual and temporal of this our Realm, and by all the Commons in the same by Act of Parliament, and not set forth by any councillor or councillors upon their mere will and phantasy, as ye full falsely would persuade our realm to believe. And when ye allege that the service of God is much diminished, the truth thereof is contrary, for there be no houses suppressed where God was well served, but where most vice, mischief, and abomination of living was used, and that doth well appear by their own confessions subscribed with their own hands in the time of their visitations, and yet we suffered a great many of them (more than we needed by the Act) to stand, wherein if they amend not their living, or fear, we have more to answer for than for the suppression of all the rest. And as for the hospitality for the relief of the poor, we wonder that ye be not ashamed to affirm that they have been a great relief of poor people, when a great many or the most part hath not past four or five religious persons in them, and divers but one which spent the substance of the goods of their houses in nourishing of vice and abominable living. Now what unkindness and unnaturality may be impute to you and all our subjects that be of that mind, that had liefer such an unthrifty sort of vicious persons, should enjoy such possessions, profits and enrolments, as grow of the said houses, to the maintenance of their unthrifty life, than he your natural prince, Sovereign lord and king, which doth and hath spent more in your defences of your own, than six times they be worth. As touching the act of uses, we marvel what madness is in your brain, or upon what ground ye would take authority upon you to cause us to break those laws and statutes by which all the noble knights and gentlemen of this realm (whom the same chiefly toucheth) hath been granted and assented to: seeing in no