Great Britain -- History -- Mary I, 1553-1558; Mary I, Queen of England, 1516-1558
"As the devil, Christ's antient adversary, is a
liar and the father of lying, even so hath he
stirred his servants and members to persecute
Christ and his true word and religion, which he
ceaseth not to do most earnestly at this present.
For whereas the most noble prince, of famous
memory, King Henry VIII., seeing the great abuses
of the Latin masses, reformed some things therein
in his time, and also our late sovereign lord King
Edward VI. took the same wholly away, for the
manifold errours and abuses thereof, and restored
in the place thereof Christ's holy supper,
according to Christ's own institution, and as the
Apostles in the primitive Church used the same in
the beginning, the devil goeth about by lying to
overthrow the Lord's holy supper, and to restore
the Latin satisfactory masses, a thing of his own
invention and device. And to bring the same more
clearly to pass, some have abused the name of me,
Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, bruiting abroad
that I have set up the mass at Canterbury, and that
I offered to say mass before the Queen's Highness
at Paul's Cross and I wot not where. I have been
well exercised these twenty years, to suffer and to
bear evil reports and lies, and have not been much
grieved thereat, and have borne all things quietly;
yet where untrue reports and lies turn to the
hindrance of God's truth, they be in no ways to be
tolerated and suffered. Wherefore these be to
signify to the world that it was not I that did set
up the mass at Canterbury, but a false, flattering,
lying, and dissembling monk, which caused the mass
to be set up there without my advice and counsel:
and as for offering myself to say mass before the
Queen's Highness, or in any other place, I never
did, as her Grace knoweth well. But if her Grace
will give me leave, I shall be ready to prove
against all that will say the contrary, that the
Communion-book, set forth by the most innocent and
godly prince King Edward VI., in his High Court of
Parliament, is conformable to the order which our
Saviour Christ did both observe and command to be
observed, which his Apostles and primitive Church
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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