A HISTORY OF NORFOLK repented of his apostasy and returned to Norfolk. There he preached privately, but was eventually apprehended by the bishop's officers. As a relapsed heretic there could be but one fate for him, for which he prepared with great fortitude. He was constantly assailed by the entreaties of the four chief orders of the friars, each of whom wished to have the honour of re-converting him, and heard mass on the morning of his execution, 19 August, 1 53 1. At the Lollards' Pit he spoke to the crowd, and read a paper handed to him by Dr. Pellys, the chancellor, but the nature of his last words is uncertain, and there was a hot controversy concerning them after his death, between Read, the mayor, and John Curat, an alderman.' During the previous year Thomas Hilton, another Norfolk man, one of Tyndal's secret agents in importing the forbidden New Testament, had been burned at Maidstone as a heretic' In 1534, the bishop, then ninety years of age and blind, incurred the penalties of a praemunire, because he had infringed the customs of Thetford, by citing the mayor before him." Chapuys, writing to Charles V, II February, 1534,* says that the real reason was that he had burnt a doctor (Thomas Bilney), who was a companion and sworn brother of the archbishop of Canterbury, without waiting for the king's placet before condemning him, though it arrived before the execution, and that he was rich. He was adjudged to pay the heavy fine of 10,000//, and it was probably really to procure this money that the sentence had been pronounced. Public feeling in the county was so strong, on account of his great age, and the liberality with which in his later years he dispensed the immense wealth he had amassed,^ that Hewet, the mayor, had to petition Cromwell to take him into his service, ' as he is like to be undone for ever ' on account of his action.* Possibly we may see in this an indication of a reactionary feeling setting in within the county, as Hewet had previously been brought up before the bishop on various charges of heresy. A certain truculence distinguished the bishop and alienates sympathy from him, but it is impossible to read without compunction of his last days ; when, old and blind,' with resources crippled to procure a costly pardon from the king, he again had to submit to the humiliation of a visitation in his see carried out by Archbishop Cranmer in the same year, in spite of his protests. The institution in 1534 of the suffragan bishoprics of Thetford and Ipswich' by the Act of 26 Hen. VIII, cap. 14, must likewise have been very distasteful to him ; as also the necessity he was under of renouncing the papal jurisdic- tion, in March, 1535.* His death on 14 January, 1536, spared him the grief of seeing the dis- solution of the religious houses, which took place under his successor, William Rugge or Reppes, consecrated 28 June, 1536. Preparations were already being made in 1535 for this step, to which the valuation known as the ' Valor ' Cal. L. and P. Hen. Fill, v. 522, 560. ' Stephens, Hist, of the Engl. Ch., iv, I 29. ' Cat. L. and P. Hen. Fill, vii, i ;8.
- Ibid. 171. =■ Ibid, ix, 978. ' Ibid, vii, 1 58.
' The accounts given by the official, Mr. Southwell (ibid, x, 67, 85), of the trouble he had in searching for, and in guarding, the jewels, plate, writings, and goods of the late bishop, which are scattered abroad, of much value, as well as divers sums of money lent in the life of the late bishop, suggest a forlorn picture of senile irresponsibility at the mercy of the unscrupulous. ^ Hardy and Gee, Doc. lUus. of Engl. Church Hist. 253. ' Cal. L. and P. Hen. Fill, viii, 311. 254
