Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 1.djvu/167

128. I. FEB. 26, 1916.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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cult of King Henry VI., than whom, says Polydore Vergil, "there was not in the world a more pure, more honest, and more holy creature," widely assumed a formal character and definite proportions that are far more distinct, and that longer persevered, than is usually supposed. In spite of Bacon's flippancy, and Hall's cheap sneer that expense deterred Henry VII. from pursuing the cause at Rome, there can be no possible doubt that it was the chaotic upheaval of the Reformation which alone prevented an official canonization. Already had Blakman, the Carthusian, collected authoritative evidence of sanctity, an important treatise, 'De Virtutibus et Miraculis Henrici VI." And so in "The English Martyrologe. Conteyning a summary of the lives of the Saintes of the three kingdomes  by a Catholicke Priest (I. W.)," 8vo, 1608, a book attributed to John Wilson and also to John Watson, under May 22 we find:—

'N. & Q.,' 2 S. i. 509 (June 28, 1856), has already given us a note with reference to this subject, and quotes two short Latin prayers "made by K. Henri VI.," as well as a prose, invocation, and collect of the King. These two prayers composed by the King, together with the prose, &c., have been printed in various editions of the 'Horæ in usum Sarum.' With regard to the cult, the two short prayers, beautiful in them- selves, are of course nothing to the point, but the invocation ("V. Ora pro nobis Denote Rex Henrice. R. Ut per te cuncti superati sint inimici") is highly important, a detail which should have been more clearly brought out when it was previously quoted. In a fifteenth-century 'Horæ B.M.V.' (Stowe MSS. 16) we find written in a very late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century script entirely differing from the rest of the 'Horæ,' which are in an earlier and better character an antiphon and collect affording certain evidence of a regular cult:—

"Rex Henricus pauperum et ecclesiae defensor, ad misericordiam pronus, in caritate feruidus, in pietate deditus, et clerum decorauit, quem Deus sic beatincauit.

"[V.] Ora pro nobis beate serue Dei Henrice.

"[R.] Ut digni efficiamur [promissionibus Christi.].

"Oremus.