Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/210

 202 THE GREAT STATUTE OF PRAEMUNIRE April It is unfortunate that no light is thrown on the question by what occurred after the cardinal's return to England in 1432. For he immediately confronted his enemies in parliament, said that according to information received while he was abroad he was accused of treason, and challenged his accuser to bring his charge then and there. Gloucester and 'the other lords meekly answered that no one had accused him of any treason or, to the best of their knowledge, wished to do so, but that the king held him to be a true and loyal subject. 1 Afterwards, at the petition of the commons, it was ordained that Beaufort should be exempt from all proceedings on account of any offence against any statute of provisors, any exemption, any receipt or execution of papal bulls, or anything else whereby he might be liable to the penalties contained in the statutes of provisors. 2 The wording is of course far too comprehensive to be of any service in our present inquiry. On the whole, it seems likely that the statute ' on ' which the two writs against Beaufort were sealed was that of 1390, and that the charge of purchasing exemption from obedience to Canterbury was dropped. The preparation of two writs might have been suggested by the statute of 1365 no less than by that of 1393, and was, after all, natural in the circumstances : Beaufort was abroad ; if he returned, the writ of attachment would be executed ; while if he thought it wise to remain on the Continent, proceedings could still be taken against him by writ of praemunire. Nevertheless, it may well have been as a result of the researches ordered by the council that the statute of 1393 was drawn from the obscurity in which it had lain and that atten- tion was attracted to its potentialities as a weapon against the pope or the clergy. It is perhaps not without significance that the statute of 1401 which figures with it in the petition of 1447 was one with a direct bearing on Beaufort's case. That an attempt to ruin a cardinal started on its destructive career the measure which, nearly a century later, ruined another and yet greater one may be a mere conjecture, but it is a conjecture that sorts well with all the known facts. It is of course true that when the statute began to cause public debate, it was generally understood to refer to all docu- ments prejudicial to the Crown if they came from abroad, while the secular courts held that it applied to all such documents irrespective of their source. But there is nothing in this which is incompatible with my view of the original intention of the measure. That there is no recorded instance of its having been proves that Gloucester was thinking of the statute of 1390, under which he would have had the right of appointing whom he pleased to the see. 1 Rot. Parl. iv. 390 seq. a Ibid. p. 392.