Note 66 — Chapter XII
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Many of the clergy and even of the monks had already taken the permission of their own authority. Cranmer himself was said to be secretly married; and in some cases women, whom we find reported in this letter of Cromwell’s visitors as concubines of priests, were really and literally their wives, and had been formally married to them. I have discovered one singular instance of this kind.
Ap Rice, writing to Cromwell in the year 1535 or 6, says:
“As we were of late at Walden, the abbot, then being a man of good learning and right sincere judgment, as I examined him alone, shewed me secretly, upon stipulation of silence, but only unto you, as our judge, that he had contracted matrimony with a certain woman secretly, having present thereat but one trusty witness; because he, not being able, as he said, to contain, though he could not be suffered by the laws of man, saw he might do it lawfully by the laws of God; and for the avoiding of more inconvenience, which before he was provoked unto, he did thus, having confidence in you that this act should not be anything prejudicial unto him.”—MS. State Paper Office, temp. Henry VIII., second series, Vol. XXXV.
Cromwell acquiesced in the reasonableness of the abbot’s proceeding; he wrote to tell him “to use his remedy,” but to avoid, as far as possible, creating a scandal.—MS. ibid. Vol. XLVI.
The government, however, found generally a difficulty in knowing what to resolve in such cases. The king’s first declaration was a reasonable one, that all clergy who had taken wives should forfeit their orders, “and be had and reputed as lay persons to all purposes and intents.”—Royal Proclamation: Wilkins’s Concilia, Vol. III. p. 776.