Petrarch expressed it, and finally an open enemy and subverter of the Greek empire.

Philippicus and Leo, with divers other emperors after them, not without the advice of their patriarchs, and at length of a whole eastern Council of three hundred and thirty-eight bishops, threw the images out of churches as being decreed idolatrous. Upon this goodly occasion, the bishop of Rome not only seizes. the city, and all the territory about, into his own hands, and makes himself lord thereof, which till then was governed by a Greek magistrate, but absolves all Italy of their tribute and obedience due to the emperor, because he obeyed God's cominandment in abolishing idolatry.

Mark, Sir, here, how the pope came by St. Peter's patrimony, as he feigns it; not the donation of Constantine, but idolatry and rebellion got it him. Ye need but read Sigonius, one of his own sect, to know the story at large. And now to shroud himself against a storm from the Greek continent, and provide a champion to bear him out of these practices, he takes upon him by papal sentence to unthrone Chilpericus, the rightful king of France, and gives the kingdom to Pepin, for no other cause but that he seemed to him the more active man. If he were a friend herein to monarchy, I know not; but to the monarch I need not ask what he was.

Having thus made Pepin his fast friend, he calls him into Italy against Aistulphus the Lombard, that warred upon him for his late usurpation of Rome, as belonging to Ravenna, which he had newly won. Pepin, not unobedient to the pope's call, passing into Italy, frees him out of danger, and wins for him the whole exarchate of Ravenna; which though it had been almost immediately before the hereditary possession of that monarchy which was his chief patron and benefactor, yet he takes and keeps it to himself as lawful prize, and given to St. Peter. What a dangerous fallacy is this, when a spiritual man may snatch to himself any temporal dignity or receiving it for the Church's use? England, and what not? To be

dominion, under pretence of Thus he claims Naples, Sicily, short, under show of his zeal

against the errors of the Greek Church, he never ceased baiting and goring the successors of his best lord Constantine, what by his barking curses and excommunications, what by his hindering the western princes from aiding them against the Saracens and Turks, unless when they humoured him; so that it may be truly affirmed, he was the subversion and fall of that Monarchy which was the hoisting of him. This, besides Petrarch, whom I have cited, our Chaucer also hath observed, and gives from hence a caution to England, to beware of her bishops in time, for that their ends and aims are no more friendly to Monarchy than the pope's.

This he begins in the Ploughman speaking, part ii. stanza 28:

"The emperor yafe the pope sometime

So high lordship him about,

That at last the silly kime,

The proud pope put him out;
So of this realm is no doubt,

But lords beware and them defend ;

For now these folks be wonders stout,

The king and lords now this amend.”

And in the next stanza, which begins the third part of the tale, he argues that they ought not to be lords:

"Moses law forbode it tho

That priests should no lordship welde,
Christ's gospel biddeth also

That they should no lordships held :

Ne Christ's apostles were never so bold

No such lordships to hem embrace,

But smeren her sheep and keep her fold."

And so forward. Whether the bishops of England have deserved thus to be feared by men so wise as our Chaucer is esteemed; and how agreeable to our Monarchy and Monarchs their demeanour has been, he that is but meanly read in our chronicles needs not be instructed. Have they not been as the Canaanites and Philistines to this kingdom? What treasons, what revolts to the pope, what rebellions, and those the basest and most pretenceless, have they not been chief in? What could Monarchy think, when Becket durst challenge the custody of Rochester

Castle, and the Tower of London, as appertaining to his signory? to omit his other insolencies and affronts to regal majesty, until the lashes inflicted on the anointed body of the king washed off the holy unction with his blood drawn by the polluted hands of bishops, abbots, and monks.

What good upholders of royalty were the bishops, when, by their rebellious opposition against king John, Normandy was lost, he himself deposed, and this kingdom made over to the pope? When the bishop of Winchester durst tell the nobles, the pillars of the realm, that there were no peers in England, as in France, but that the king might do what he pleased, what could tyranny say more? It would be pretty now if I should insist upon the rendering up of Tournay by Wolsey's treason, the excommunications, cursings, and interdicts upon the whole land; for haply I shall be cut off short by a reply, that these were the faults of men and their popish errors, not of Episcopacy, that hath now renounced the Pope, and is a Protestant. Yes, sure; as wise and famous men have suspected and feared the Protestant Episcopacy in England, as those that have feared the Papal.

You know, sir, what was the judgment of Padre Paolo, the great Venetian antagonist of the pope, for it is extant in the hands of many men, whereby he declares his fear, that when the hierarchy of England shall light into the hands of busy and audacious men, or shall meet with princes tractable to the prelacy, then much mischief is like to ensue. And can it be nearer hand than when bishops shall openly affirm that, "No Bishop no King"? A trim paradox, and that ye may know where they have been a begging for it, I will fetch you the twin brother to it out of the Jesuits' cell: they feeling the axe of God's Reformation, hewing at the old and hollow trunk of papacy, and finding the Spaniard their surest friend and safest refuge, to soothe him up in his dream of a fifth monarchy, and withal to uphold the decrepit papalty, have invented this superpolitic aphorism, as one terms it, "One pope and one king.”

Surely there is not any prince in Christendom, who, hearing this rare sophistry, can choose but smile; and if we be not blind

at home, we may as well perceive that this worthy motto, "No Bishop no King," is of the same batch, and infanted out of the same fears, a mere ague-cake, coagulated of a certain fever they have, presaging their time to be but short. And now, like those that are sinking, they catch round of that which is likeliest to hold them up; and would persuade regal power that if they dive, he must after. But what greater debasement can there be to royal dignity, whose towering and steadfast height rests upon the unmovable foundations of justice and heroic virtue, than to chain it in a dependence of subsisting or ruining to the painted battlements and gaudy rottenness of prelatry, which want but one puff of the King's to blow them down like a pasteboard house built of court-cards? Sir, the little ado which methinks I find in untacking these pleasant sophisms, puts me into the mood to tell you a tale ere I proceed further; and Menenius Agrippa speed us.

Upon a time the Body summoned all the members to meet in the guild, for the common good (as Æsop's chronicles aver many stranger accidents): the head by right takes the first seat, and next to it a huge and monstrous wen, little less than the head itself, growing to it by a narrower excrescency. The members, amazed, began to ask one another what he was that took place next their chief? None could resolve. Whereat the wen, though unwieldy, with much ado gets up, and bespeaks the assembly to this purpose: "That as in place he was second to the head, so by due of merit; that he was to it an ornament, and strength, and of special near relation; and that if the head should fail, none were fitter than himself to step into his place : therefore he thought it for the honour of the body, that such dignities and rich endowments should be decreed him, as did adorn and set out the noblest members." To this was answered that it should be consulted. Then was a wise and learned philosopher sent for, that knew all the charters, laws, and tenures of the Body. On him it is imposed by all, as chief committee, to examine, and discuss the claim and petition of right put in by the wen; who soon perceiving the matter, and wondering at the

boldness of such a swoln tumour, "Wilt thou," quoth he, "that art but a bottle of vicious and hardened excrements, contend with the lawful and freeborn members, whose certain number is set by ancient and unrepealable statute? Head thou art none, though thou receive this huge substance from it. What office bearest thou? what good can'st thou shew by thee done to the commonweal?" The wen, not easily dashed, replies that his office was his glory; for so oft as the soul would retire out of the head from over the steaming vapours of the lower parts to divine contemplation, with him she found the purest and quietest retreat, as being most remote from soil and disturbance. "Lourdan," quoth the philosopher, "thy folly is as great as thy filth know that all the faculties of the soul are confined of old to their several vessels and ventricles, from which they cannot part without dissolution of the whole body; and that thou containest no good thing in thee, but a heap of hard and loathsome uncleanness, and art to the head a foul disfigurement and burden. When I have cut thee off, and opened thee, as by the help of these implements I will do, all men shall see."

But to return whence was digressed: seeing that the throne of a King, as the wise King Solomon often remembers us, "is established in justice," which is the universal justice that Aristotle so much praises, containing in it all other virtues, it may assure us that the fall of prelacy, whose actions are so far distant from justice, cannot shake the least fringe that borders the royal canopy. But that their standing doth continually oppose and lay battery to regal safety, shall by that which follows easily appear. Amongst many secondary and accessory causes that support. Monarchy, these are not of least reckoning, though common to all other states; the love of the subjects, the multitude and valour of the people, and store of treasure. In all these things hath the kingdom been of late sore weakened, and chiefly by the prelates. First, let any man consider, that if any prince shall suffer under him a commission of authority to be exercised, till all the land groan and cry out as against a whip of scorpions, whether this be not likely to lessen and keel the affections of the subject.