BISHOP AYLMER. 149 



&quot; that you allege, why you must have thousands, as though CHAP. 

 &quot; you were commanded to keep hospitality rather with a __ 

 &quot; thousand than with an hundred.&quot; 



Indeed our Divine was then, as appears sufficiently by 

 what is above said, no friend to the wealth and grandeur of 

 those Papal Bishops that were then in place, who affected 

 splendor and glory more than true regard to Christ and his 

 flock, and had shewn themselves the greatest opposers of 

 the Gospel, and the reformation of the corruptions of the 

 Church. And hence he spared them not. And in another 

 place of his book, &quot; Could the Bishops ruffle in their robes, 

 &quot; keep their great horses, and have their thousands yearly, 

 &quot; with all the rest of their superfluity, if she [Queen Eliza- 

 &quot; beth, lately come to reign] were not their bulwark, and 

 &quot; took care for them, while they care not for her :&quot; mean 

 ing these Popish Prelates, who remained at present in their 

 places, and whom the Protestants feared might still con 

 tinue there. But Ay liner s expressions were so general 

 against all Bishops, that they were afterwards by the ene 

 mies of episcopacy thrown in his own teeth, and of the rest 

 of the Protestant Bishops. And he himself was fain to 

 make apology (the best he could) for those words of his. 

 One of the taunts on this occasion cast at him by Martin 

 Marprelate was, that he prayed Bishop Aylmer to resolve 

 him, that in case this prophecy of Mr. Aylmer (meaning 

 those words of his book, &quot; come down, ye Bishops, from 

 * your thousands,&quot; &c.) came to pass in his days, who then 

 should be Bishop of London ? 



But to return to the book itself. He dedicated it to the Dedicates it 

 Earl of Bedford and the Lord Dudley; and therein gave *f Bedford 

 the reason that moved him to write, protesting, in the name and Lord 

 of the rest of the learned Protestants, against this Blast to 

 overthrow the government of women ; and that he took this 

 work in hand so much the rather, because, if no man should 

 have done it, all their side should seem to have borne with 

 it ; which he knew to be so far off, that none that he knew 

 (he spake of the learned) were any further guilty in this 

 point, than that by their [public] declaration they had not 



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