Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/26

6 and no further,' was the stern answer which checked the zeal of conservatism; and the blow which the Bishop had aimed was fatal in its recoil. It was not every one who had the skill or the dishonesty to eliminate out of Catholicism the one only element which it was inconvenient or dangerous to retain. His secretary, Germayn Gardiner, developed orthodoxy into Romanism. He was caught under the Supremacy Act; and the death which the Bishop designed for Cranmer fell upon his own kinsman.

A failure so instructive might have warned Gardiner of the dangerous ground on which he was treading. But the treaty had heated his fancy. He had missed his stroke at the Archbishop, but meaner victims were still attainable. The Bill of the Six Articles was the law of the land. It had received a second emphatic sanction from Parliament; and the King could not intend that it should be defied with impunity. The town of Windsor, and even the royal household, were reported to be impregnated with heresy. Dr London, the Warden of New College, was now a prebendary of St George's, and was ready with his services to assist in the purification. With the assistance of the prebendary and of a Windsor attorney named Ockham, evidence was collected or invented to sustain a charge against four of the townsmen, Robert Testwood, Anthony Peerson, Henry