ודרי

RECORDS OF THE REFORMATION

THE DIVORCE 1527-1533

MOSTLY NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME PRINTED FROM MSS. IN THE BRITISH

MUSEUM, THE PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, THE VENETIAN ARCHIVES,

AND OTHER LIBRARIES

COLLECTED AND ARRANGED

BY

NICHOLAS POCOCK, M. A.

LATE MICHEL FELLOW OF QUEEN'S COLLEGE

VOL. I

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

MDCCCLXX

1870

[ All rights reserved]

EDITOR'S PREFACE

THE plan of these two volumes has been somewhat enlarged since the printing of the first few sheets of the first volume. In the course of editing Burnet's "History of the Reformation,' and searching for the originals of the Records he had printed at the end of each of the three volumes of his work, as vouchers for the accuracy and truth of his assertions in the text, I gradually became acquainted with the contents of various Collections of State Papers, of the existence of which, when I began the work, I knew nothing. Some of these papers existed in volumes of the Cotton Library which had been in Burnet's hands, and some few had been referred to by him in the margin of the text of his History in cases where he had not taken the trouble to print the whole despatch in his Collection of Records ; but by far the larger part of this magnificent Collection must have been wholly unknown to him, as it was also to Strype, who succeeded him, and who, however inferior he may have been to him in general powers of mind, and in that ease of writing which distinguishes Burnet from all his contemporaries, must be pronounced

to have been a more laborious collector and transcriber of manuscripts. My attention was especially drawn to the neglect of the volume entitled Vitellius, B. xiii, from which so much has been printed in the present work. It is needless here to speculate on the reasons which induced both Burnet and Strype to pay so little attention to a volume which, at least, would have set at rest the question whether the Universities and individual Canonists and Theologians in Northern Italy were bribed to give opinions in the king's favour in the matter of the divorce from Catharine of Arragon. But it is much to be regretted that they made so little use of it, because it has since their time suffered severely from the effects of fire, as may be seen at once by reference to any of the documents in the latter half of the first volume which have been printed from it. It would scarcely be fair to say of either of these historians that they omitted all such documents as they did not like ; yet the selection they have made certainly seems to give some countenance to that accusation. A more probable view of the matter is, that they selected those papers which seemed to them most interesting and intelligible, and that thus their attention was unconsciously directed to documents which proved most in favour of what they would have called the Protestant as opposed to the Roman side of the controversy. That Burnet was not consciously dishonest in his selection may be argued from his having printed papers which, when compared with his own account of their contents in the Text of his History, hardly seem to bear out his statements, and, in some cases, very directly contradict the view which he elicits from them. But independently of the State Papers which have found their way by fair or foul means into Sir Robert Cotton's Collection, there is an immense amount of MSS. belonging to what was

EDITOR'S PREFACE.

vii

formerly the State Paper Office and other public Repositories in London which have all, since the time when the new edition of Burnet was being prepared for the press, been removed to the Public Record Office. Some of these State Papers had been printed by Foxe, Herbert, Strype, Collier, and other historians, and a large collection, confined, with few exceptions, to the originals existing in the State Paper Office, had been printed in the handsome and well-executed publication of State Papers of the reign of Henry VIII, published under the auspices of the First Record Commission between the years 1840 and 1850, in eleven volumes quarto. A very cursory examination, however, of the originals still existing in the Record Office would be enough to shew that many documents of the utmost importance had been omitted in the Collection published by the Government; to say nothing of the valuable papers to be found in the Bodleian Library, at Lambeth, and elsewhere. It would not be easy to say on what principle the editor of the eleven volumes made his selection. It will be sufficient to observe that many of the papers that were that were most difficult to read have been passed over, and that in the small selection of documents from the Cotton Collection which appears in those volumes, very few of the important ciphered despatches have been printed, and that there seems to have been a systematic avoidance of those which were most mutilated, and therefore least intelligible.

It seemed, therefore, worth while to make a new selection, for the sake of supplying the omissions of previous transcribers, and the principle adopted was to print nearly all such papers as would throw any light upon the religious changes introduced at the time of the Reformation-so as to constitute, as far as possible, nearly all that might serve for that History of the

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