The opening sentences of the letter (it was evidently a circular) also deserve notice: “These shall be to advertize you that when the King’s Majesty hath of long season travelled, and yet most godly travaileth to establish such an order in matters of religion as neither declining on the right hand or on the left hand, God’s glory might be advanced, the temerity of such as would either obscure or refuse the truth of his Word refrained, stayed, and in cases of obstinacy duly corrected and punished; so it is that the Lord Privy Seal, to whom the King’s Majesty hath been so special good and gracious a lord, hath, only out of his sensual appetite, wrought clean contrary to his Grace’s intent, secretly and indirectly advancing the one of the extremes, and leaving the mean, indifferent, true, and virtuous way which his Majesty so entirely desired, but also hath shewed himself so fervently bent to the maintenance of that his outrage, that he hath not spared most privily, most traitorously to devise how to continue the same, and in plain terms to say,” &c. Then follow the words in the text.—Ibid.
— from History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. III by James Anthony Froude