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and to exhort them to the truth, showing them that if any of them will, he shall have a dispensation to leave that Order and to live otherwise, and to have convenient stipend for a year or two, till he have provided himself of a living, so that he conform himself to the King's laws, and to endeavour himself to learn and to preach the word of God, which every priest is bound to do, and yet by their Religion (as it is said) they have professed falsely the contrary, that none of them shall ever preach the word of God.

"Item, to put all the monks to the cloister for a season, and that no man speak to them but by the license of one of the said governors.

"Item, to take from them all manner of books wherein any error be contained, and to let them all. have the Old Testament and the New Testament.

"Item, to cause them to show all their ceremonies, and to teach them and to exhort them to leave and to forsake all such ceremonies that be nought.

"Item, if they find any of them so obstinate that in nowise will be reformed, then to commit him to prison till the Council may take some other direction for them. And they that will be reformed, to sever them from the company of the obstinates, and to be gently handled to cause them to utter the secrets and mischiefs used among them.

"Item, there would be three or four times in every week during this visitation a sermon made by some discreet, well-learned men, and all the monks, officers and servants, to be caused to be there present, none exception save only sickness, and the

said preachers to have their chambers there and meat and drink, that they might quietly study there during that time.

"Item, the lay-brothers be more obstinate and more froward and more unreasonable than the monks; therefore they would be likewise examined, and the obstinates punished or expulsed, and the others kept for a season for knowledge of divers points of them to be had."

When this treatment had lasted for a year without success, the commissaries began to lose patience, and on the anniversary of their blessed Prior's martyrdom, four of the most influential of the monks were seized and sent off to distant houses of the Order. For two of the four it was the summons to martyrdom. These were Dom John Rochester and Dom James Walworth.1 Of the latter but few details have survived. Dom Rochester is often mentioned in the course of the vexatious persecutions of the preceding year. In August of 1535, Cranmer sent for him, but evidently unable to move him, sent him back to the monastery. At another time William Marshall, a zealous agent of the schism, and John Maydwell, a fallen friar, made great efforts to tempt him, but were obliged to report that "they left him as they found him." About the same time Bedyll and a Dr. Crome tried their hand on the faithful priest, and another religious, "by the space of an hour

1 The name of the martyr is sometimes written Walwerke and Wannert.

1

and more; but it prevailed nothing; but they left those froward monks as erroneous as they found them, wherein was much lack of grace." The commissary, Jaspar Fylalle, who has recorded these particulars in a letter to Cromwell, induced the blessed man to read a book of William Marshall's, entitled Defence of Peace, but having read it, he burned it. One Sunday during the conventual Mass, he was carried by force, with the Blessed James Walworth and a third religious, to St. Paul's by Cromwell's orders, and there obliged to listen in a prominent position to a sermon preached by one of the Bishops in the sense of the Court. The two confessors were now sent to the monastery at Hull-with the double object of removing their example from the Charterhouse of London, and of placing them under an influence more favourable to the King's will: for, alas! the Carthusians of Hull had bent to the storm like so many others on every side. Here, however, they were as constant. as they had been in London, and at length after some months they were brought before the Duke of Norfolk at York, and condemned to death on the charge that "on the eighth day of May, in the twenty-ninth year of the most illustrious and most Christian prince and our Lord Henry VIII. . . . and on divers days and times before . . . did separately, falsely and traitorously affirm, and each of them did affirm and say, that the said Lord, the King that now is, was not supreme head of the Church of England on earth, but that the Bishop of Rome was and is the supreme head of

the same on earth.”1 The two holy martyrs were hanged on the 11th of May, 1537. For some unknown reason they were not disembowelled and quartered as the other martyrs were, but their bodies were left hanging in chains until they dropped limb from limb.

E. S. K.

1 Mr. Froude with characteristic inaccuracy, although in an otherwise sympathetic account of the Carthusian martyrs, states that the Blessed John Rochester and James Walworth were executed for taking part in the Pilgrimage of Grace. The original indictment is still to be read among the Cottonian MSS. in the British Museum (Cleop. E. vi. 231) and contains no other charge whatever than that quoted in the text.

VIII.

THE BLESSED THOMAS JOHNSON WITH EIGHT COMPANIONS, AND THE BLESSED WILLIAM HORNE,

CARTHUSIANS.

London, June to September, 1537, and 4 August, 1540. THE despatch of the four Fathers of the London Charterhouse to the north on May 4, 1536, was only part of a plan for breaking up the community, in the hope of dealing with the separate members or groups more successfully. Accordingly eight other Fathers were now sent to the custody of the Bridgettine monks of Syon House. Here they were advised to yield and assured that the question of the Supremacy was not one for which they ought to incur death. Strange to say, this evil counsel was given them on his death-bed, by the Confessor General who had been the friend of the Blessed John Houghton, and had encouraged him to martyrdom. The religious were for the moment. shaken, and no doubt on this account were allowed to return to their brethren, amongst whom however they quickly recovered their old firmness, to the anger and mortification of the commissaries.

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