of Colchester, of which he was admitted a free burgess in 1516; and he had been of the council of the Princess Mary, when she held her court at Ludlow.'

The step by which he raised himself to eminence seems to have been the obtaining a seat in the House of Commons. There no doubt he supported the measures of the Court, as he was elected speaker of the parliament that met in November, 1529. This was called the Black Parliament, and was signalised by the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, and by the first attack on the papal power. So zealous were the speaker's services, that he was rewarded by a rapid advance in his profession. In 1530 he was appointed attorney for the duchy of Lancaster; and on November 14, 1531, a day or two after he had assumed the coif, he was made king's serjeant.

One of the earliest duties imposed upon him as speaker, was to convey to the king the complaint of the Commons against Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, for saying in parliament that the bills sent by them to the Lords were all for the destruction of the Church, and arose only from lack of faith. The bishop, when called on, gave an evasive explanation, which "pleased the commons nothing at all." On another occasion Audley was sent for in consequence of a member named Temse having moved the Commons to sue the king to take Queen Catherine again as his companion, when his Majesty marvelled not a little that they should touch a matter which was not to be determined there, and took the trouble of declaring that his conscience alone caused him to abstain from her company, and no foolish or wanton appetite; "for," added he, "I am forty-one years old, at which age the lust of man is not so quicke as in lustie youth," — a saying to which the members no doubt gave just as much credence as is now accorded by those who are acquainted with his subsequent history. It was then evidently the practice for the king to

Miss Strickland's Queens of England, v. 156.

communicate with the speaker and certain members of the house on subjects which he intended to come before them; for it appears that in another interview he produced to them the oaths taken by the bishops to himself and to the pope, complaining that they bee but halfe our subiectes, yea, and scarce our subiectes," with the ultimate view that the Commons should adopt some measure to declare his supremacy. In all these matters he found Audley so willing an instrument, that it was not long before he secured the speaker's services in a still more prominent position.

Having filled the place of Sir Thomas More as speaker of the House of Commons, so did he succeed that eminent man in the possession of the Great Seal. He received it from the king on May 20, 1532, at the "manor of the Plesaunce, alias Est Grenewich," with the title of lord keeper, being dubbed a knight at the same time. History does not state the reason why the inferior title of keeper only was given to him; and it is impossible to adopt Lord Campbell's questionable suggestion, that it was to enable him to continue in his place in the House of Commons; the more especially as the parliament was not then sitting, and as on the 26th of the following January, before it had re-assembled, Audley was invested with the title of lord chancellor. This office he held for the rest of his life; but during his last illness he sent the Seal to the king, who deposited it temporarily with Sir Thomas Wriothesley during Audley's infirmities, which in a few days terminated in his death.3

Audley had the custody of the Seal for nearly twelve years, a period more disgraceful in the annals of England than any of a similar extent. Within it were comprehended the king's divorce from one queen, after an union of two and twenty years, under pretence of a scruple of conscience; the

1 Hall's Chron. (1809), pp. 766. 788.

* Claus. 24 Henry VIII., ii. 16. m. 24. $ Ibid. 36 Hen. VIII., p. 1. n. 3.

repudiation of another after a few days' intercourse, on the mere ground of personal antipathy; the execution of two others, one of them sacrificed to obtain a new partner; and innumerable judicial and remorseless murders, those of Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher leading the dreadful array. Even the Reformation, the foundations of which were laid during this period, though producing such glorious results to this country, brings nothing but disgrace on its active originators. Commenced by a despotic tyrant in defiance of the religious tenets which he had himself advocated and which he still professed, the power of the pope was abjured solely in revenge for the papal refusal to sanction his divorce; his own imposed supremacy was only used to introduce doctrines. which it was equally difficult for Catholics or Protestants to adopt, each suffering in turn from the dilemma in which they were placed; and the monasteries were dissolved, not for the professed purposes of purification, but for the sake of the riches they produced to the king's treasury, and to supply the means of rewarding the subservient minions of his power.

66

Among these, Audley, who all along acted as a thorough tool to the king, and was a most zealous promoter of the suppression, secured no inconsiderable share of the confiscations, carving for himself in the feast of abbey lands," as Fuller humorously remarks, "the first cut, and that a dainty morsel." This was the magnificent priory of the Holy Trinity, or Christchurch, in Aldgate, London, founded in the reign of Henry I., which, having been surrendered by the prior, was granted to the chancellor within a year after he attained that dignity. He pulled down the great church, and converted the priory into a mansion for himself, in which he resided during the remainder of his life. It was subsequently called Duke's Place, from his son-in-law the Duke of Norfolk. To this were next added many of the smaller priories in

the neighbourhood of Colchester, with which his former connection with that town had made him acquainted. But he was not satisfied with even these extensive spoils; for having fixed his eye on the rich monastery of Walden in the the same county, in suing for it he not only lessened its value, but had the meanness to allege that he had in this world sustained great damage and infamy in his serving the king, which the grant of this abbey would recompense. He succeeded in his application, and took his title from the plunder when the king on November 29, 1538, raised him to the peerage as Baron Audley of Walden. The order of the Garter was soon after disgraced by his admission among its members.

With the attainment of these riches and honours, however, he could never feel secure, seeing as he did the most favourite ministers fall successively under the caprice of his arbitrary and hard-hearted master. The consciousness that the odious laws he had introduced might be turned against himself, and that his fate depended on the momentary whim of an inexorable tyrant, may most probably have brought on, only five years afterwards, that illness which terminated in his death.

This occurred at his mansion in London, on April 30, 1544. His remains were deposited under a magnificent tomb erected by himself in his chapel at Walden, with an epitaph in verse as contemptible as his career.1

In an age of the meanest compliance with the will of the prince, Audley has acquired the character of undoubtedly equalling, if he did not exceed, all his contemporaries in servility. The only circumstance that rescues his name from entire opprobium, is his appropriation of part of his illgotten wealth to the restoration of the college in Cambridge which Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, beheaded in 1521, had founded two years before his death, and left incom

Weever, 624.

plete. Audley procured its incorporation, and endowed it with considerable property which had formerly belonged to the priory of the Holy Trinity, obtaining the king's license to change its name of Buckingham College to that of St. Mary Magdalen, which it now bears. That he adopted this title, as he is charged by some writers, because its ordinary English pronunciation, "Maudleyn," contained his own name between the initial and final letters, is too absurd to be believed. He may be acquitted of such a puerility, without giving him much credit for his wit. The only example recorded of the latter, is in the application of two of "Isopes fables" to the case of Sir Thomas More, then in the Tower for conscience' sake, which he related to Alice Alington, Sir Thomas's step-daughter, to show that the conscientious prisoner was only "obstinate in his own conceite." One of these was the story of the wise men who hid themselves in caves to avoid the rain which was to make all fools on whom it fell, hoping to rule the fools when the storm was over; but the fools were the more numerous, and would not then be ruled. The other was of the confessions of the lion, the ass, and the wolf, intimating that Sir Thomas's conscience was like that of the ass, who confessed that he had in his hunger taken one straw out of his master's shoe, by which he thought his master had taken cold. More, on receiving a report of the interview, showed that the first tale was a clumsy repetition of one often told to the Council by Cardinal Wolsey as a reason for going to war, which fable, he adds, “dydde in hys dayes help the king and the realme to spend manye a fayre penye." The second tale he proved not to be Æsop's, and wittily turned the application of both from himself to the relator.1

There was so much more of sneering heartlessness in this conversation with Alice Alington, than of the sympathy

Singer's Roper, 127–138.