received with procession as founders, a custom which continued long after;[1] but it was not until 1522 that the convent began to provide a feast for the corporation on that anniversary.[2] In 1524 king Henry and cardinal Wolsey personally visited the house; and shortly after William Renscrofte, a refractory lay brother of the Observants of Greenwich, was committed to the custody of the Franciscans.[3] The next year they were visited by doctor Alleyn on the part of the cardinal.[4] In 1528, in the case of a prisoner who had broken away from the sessions at Newgate,[5] the convent asserted its right of sanctuary, a privilege that could scarcely be often put in requisition, as the much-frequented sanctuary of Saint Martin le Grand was in the immediate vicinity.
The Friars Observants and the Carthusians[6] were strenuous in their opposition to the religious changes made by King Henry VIII. The Franciscans seem to have acquiesced in the course of events more passively, and the only part those in London are recorded to have taken was to give sepulture to some of the victims of the tyrant's displeasure. The corpse of the holy Maid of Kent was interred in their cemetery,[7] as were several of the Northern rebels.[8] On the 12th Nov. 1539, Thomas Chapman, doctor of divinity, their warden, and twenty-five of his brethren, signed and sealed their deed of surrender to the King, which they professed to be the result of their having arrived at a profound conviction "that the perfeccion of Christian livyng dothe not consiste in dome ceremonyes, weryng of a grey coatte, disgeasing our selffes aftyr straunge fassions, dokynges, nodyngs, and bekynges, in gurdyng owr selffes wythe a gurdle full of knots, and other like papisticall ceremonyes, wherin
