Page:Omniana 2.djvu/189

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OMNIANA.
179

confirmed by Act of Parliament, giving him leave to put on his cap, in the presence of the King, or his heirs, or any Lord spiritual or temporal in the land, and not to put it off but for his own ease and pleasure. This is a strange story, and though Henry VIII. made some of the strangest laws that ever entered into the head of a capricious and wanton tyrant, it seems very unlikely that he, of all our Kings, should have granted such a privilege to a man of whom nothing else is remembered. But Fuller says he had seen the charter; he was used to examine records, and therefore not liable to be deceived in them, and there seems no imaginable reason why such a charter should have been forged.

Few things occasioned more torment to the Quakers than the unlucky discovery of George Fox, that "the Lord forbad him to put off his hat to any man, high or low." "For though," says