Page:The religious life of King Henry VI.djvu/87

Rh eminently distasteful to the two kings, Edward IV and Richard III—the one who had supplanted him and the one who, as all the people believed, had been his murderer. It was probably through the royal influence that in 1479 Archbishop Bothe of York issued his monition against the reverence shown to the saintly King in the Minster, on the ground that such honour was unlawful until the approbation of the Sovereign Pontiff had been obtained. This, however, did not put an end to the very general devotion to the King, and as the same editor writes: "There were few towns of any consequence in England in which an image of the King was not erected in the principal church. There was one at Ripon and another at Durham, to take only a couple of instances in the north, whilst in the ea£t of England (an image) was, and indeed is still, to be seen in many altar screens."

The testimony of is of great importance as to the popular devotion to Henry VI. Harpesfield wrote his work, Historia Ecclesiastca Anglicana, when in prison for his religion in the reign of