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A History of the Protestant "reformation," in England and Ireland
A History of the Protestant reformation in England and Ireland Author:William Cobbett Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: for refusing to comply with the request was to commit unqualified murder. Yet, without such murder, without shedding innocent blood, it was impossible to effect ... more »the object. Blood must flow. Amongst the victims to this act of outrageous tyranny were Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher. The former had been the Lord High Chancellor for many years. The character given of him by his contemporaries, and by every one to the present day, is that of as great perfection for learning, integrity, and piety, as it is possible for a human being to possess. Ho was the greatest lawyer of his age, a long-tried and most faithful servant of the king and Ins father, and was, besides, so highly distinguished beyond men in general for his gentleness and humility of manners, as well as for his talents and abilities, that his murder gave a shock to all Europe. Fisher was equally eminent in point of learning, piety, and integrity. He was the only surviving privy-councillor of the late king, whose mother (the grandmother of Henry VIII., having outlived her son and daughter, besought, with her dying breath, the young king to listen particularly to the advice of this learned, pious, and venerable prelate ; and, until that advice thwarted his brutal passions, he was in the habit of saying, that no other prince could boast of a subject to be compared with Fisher. He used, at the council-board, to take him by the hand and call him his father ; marks of favour and affection which the Bishop repaid by zeal and devotion which knew no bounds other than those prescribed by his duty to God, his king, and his country. But that sacred duty bade him object to the divorce and to the king's supremacy; and then the tyrant, forgetting, at once, all his services, all his devotion, all his unparalleled attachment, sent him to t...« less