“Nevertheless John, Abbot of the monastery of St. Peter, Westminster, little weighing the said statute, verily indeed setting it at naught, scheming and seeking after the said Cardinal in all his evil deeds, joined himself to him in a fuller and more extravagant use of his said powers and pretended legatine authority, and took him as his guide and almost as his tutor and gradually undermined the laws of this realm and at last almost extinguished the same, with the result that the aforesaid Cardinal bore himself the more loftily and insolently in his legatine state and dignity. Upon a day at Westminster the said Abbot submitted himself to the Cardinal and accepted and approved the several legatine faculties and professed obedience to the same Cardinal and promised it by a binding oath. And also he promised him the annates of his exempt monastery right up to the Feast of the Annunciation, 20 Henr. VIII., and caused him to be paid in full at Westminster. And so the said Abbot abetted the said Cardinal in his contempt of the King....” _Præmunire_ was a convenient weapon in the King’s hands and he was graciously pleased to pardon Islip with various others against whom similar indictments had been laid. The pardon in Islip’s case may have facilitated the acquisition by the King of lands on which he had cast a covetous eye, the story of which has already been told. Such is the record of the part played in public affairs by a Westminster abbot in the later history of the monastery. Scanty as it is and disconnected, it will yet be seen how that public life from which he could hardly escape must have severed him from the spiritual duties which the Rule of his Order enjoined upon him. In justice to him it must be said that he was the victim of a system which had developed too far for him to be able to check it. CHAPTER VII. ISLIP AS A BUILDER. When Islip died in 1532 the Abbey Church of St. Peter, Westminster, was already (with the exception of Hawkesmoor’s addition of the incongruous western towers in the eighteenth century) substantially the church that exists to-day, but in order to understand Islip’s contribution to the buildings as well as the structure erected to some extent independently of his personal initiative, it is necessary to go back to the time when Henry of Reims produced his plan for the new church which Henry III. had designed to erect on the site where for nearly two centuries the old Norman buildings of the Confessor had stood.