lower officials in the Court of Chancery. In 1535 he was living in the house of Lord Chancellor Audley as his "servant" or clerk, and in 1544 was one of his executors and residuary legatees, and conveyed the great seal from him to Wriothesley. He was also intimate with Audley's great predecessor in the Chancellorship, Sir Thomas More; and on 5 July 1535, visited him in the Tower with the sad news that he was to be executed next morning. More entreated him to be a means to his Majesty that his daughter "Margaret [Roper] might be present at his burial," and took leave of him cheerfully, with the words

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Quiet yourself, good Mr. Pope, and be not discomforted; for I trust that we shall one day in heaven see each other full merrily, where we shall be sure to live and love together in joyful bliss eternally;"

adding the characteristic jest, as a physician diagnosing the condition of a patient, that "this man might have lived longer if it had pleased the King."1 Pope's first office was that of Clerk of Briefs in the Star Chamber, which he received in Oct. 1532, with a reversionary grant of the lucrative Clerkship of the Crown in Chancery, which fell to him in 1537. He was Keeper of Change and Money in the Tower of London 1534-6. From 1534 he had corresponded, at first patronisingly, but soon with growing deference, with the all-powerful minister Thomas Cromwell: in 1538 however they were on the verge of a quarrel over the purchase of the manor of Drayton-Basset from Sir J. Dudley. In 1536, on the suppression of the smaller religious houses, a

1 Mori Exitus, J. H [oddesdon], London 1652, p. 127.

court was created to deal with the "Augmentation of the King's Revenue," and Sir Thomas Pope became Treasurer, his duties being to receive the proceeds of sales, etc., from the 17 Receivers, and to account for them to the Chancellor, Sir Richard (Lord) Rich, and the 10 Auditors. The office was well paid and dignified ; many of Pope's accounts are preserved among the public records, and he retained the post till 1541, when he was succeeded by Sir Edward (Lord) North, in whose family his own was merged more than a century later. On the reconstitution of the Court in 1547 he was made Master of Woods and Forests South of the Trent. He was therefore recognised as a rising man: on 26 June 1535 he had obtained a grant of the arms still borne by his College (Party per pale, gold and azure, a chevron thereon 4 fleur-de-luces, between 3 griffons heddes rasyd counterchangyd on the fielde. Upon his Crest, 2 dragons heddes indorsant, rasyd, a crownette aborte their necks langued counterchaunged, set on a wrethe gold & vert, the mantlets gules doubled silver botoned gold); and on 18 Oct. 1537 he was knighted at the creation of the Earl of Hertford, with Sir Hugh Poulet, the Earl of Surrey, and many others. He was soon afterwards sworn of the Privy Council, being employed on business of importance from 1541 onwards.

Sir Thomas Pope, though not, as Fuller supposes, a "principall visitor" of the monasteries,1 did personally

1 There is no evidence for Warton's statement that he preserved the abbey church of St. Albans, there, or that he assisted the last abbess of Godstow, though "Juliana Pope," who was a nun there at the Dissolution, was not improbably his sister.

receive the surrender of St. Albans from Abbot Stevenache on 5 Dec. 1539. But from 1537 onwards he acquired by grant or purchase from the Crown a vast estate composed of abbey lands, manors, and advowsons, which had passed through his office. Though there is no reason to doubt his "candid carriage" in these acquisitions, it is not improbable that there is some truth in the tradition recorded by Aubrey, that he

"bought church lands without money. His way was this. He contracted, and then presently sold long leases, for which he had great fines and but a small rent. These leases were out in the reigne of King James the first, and then the estate was worth 8000 pounds per annum. He could have rode in his owne lands from Cogges (by Witney) to Banbury, about 18 miles."

The meaning is that he managed by means of a large fine taken at once to raise sufficient to purchase the fee-simple of these abbey lands. It is certain that all those which he conveyed to his College had been first granted on very long leases, mostly to his relations, and the plan was one which did not work badly in the case of a corporation. Among his first acquisitions were the site and demesnes of Wroxton Priory, near Banbury, not far from his old home, with Holcombe, a grange of Dorchester Priory, and other estates belonging to the smaller Oxfordshire houses of Wroxton, Bicester, Bruern, Chacombe, and Rewley. To these he gradually added other large slices of the county, in the parishes of Goring, Enstone, Bradwell, Filkins, Wilcote, North Leigh, Broughton Pogis, Cogges, Swerford, Wigginton, Tadmarton, Hooknorton, Kencot, Wolleston, and Ardley.

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Outside Oxfordshire his principal possessions were the manors of Bermondsey and Deptford-Stroud; his ordinary residences were Tyttenhanger in Hertfordshire, once the country house of the Abbots of St. Albans, and the old nunnery of Clerkenwell. In 1555 he enumerates 27 manors as then in his possession, and in 1556 a clause in his statutes speaks of property in 35 parishes or townships.

Under Edward VI. Pope's name hardly occurs at all; but he became "a great man with Queen Mary (Strype), was recalled to the Privy Council, acted on several important commissions, and was associated with Bonner, Thirlby, North, and others on a heresy committee in Feb. 1557. He was one of the company on the leads of the White Tower when Wyat and the rebel leaders were brought in, one of whom, Alexander Bret, it is said that Sir Thomas

"toke by the bosom sayinge, Oh Traytor! how couldst thou finde in thine heart to worke such vyllany,"1 etc. etc.

But the clearest proof that he was trusted by Mary was his selection 8 July 1556 to reside as guardian in the house of her sister and prisoner Elizabeth. It is possible that he was at Ashridge when she was confined there in 1554, if a letter from "the Lady Elizabeth's officers to the Queen's Counsail" is in his handwriting.2 He was certainly at Hatfield in Aug. 1556, and remained there long enough to gain the confidence of the princess, to whom he was afterwards sent on 26 Apr. 1558, to ascertain her sentiments as to the offer of

1 Queen Jane and Queen Mary, p. 51-2; Stowe, p. 621.
2 Cotton MSS.; printed by Burnet, Strype and Warton.

marriage from Eric, King of Sweden. But there is not a particle of evidence or even probability for the detailed narratives of festivities in her honour which appear in Warton's Life, pp. 86-92, on the pretended authority of non-existent transcripts1 made by Wise from imaginary extracts made for Charlett by Strype, before the fire of 1709, from the valuable Cottonian MS., known as "Machyn's Diary" since its publication by the Camden Society in 1848.

There is no evidence for a note in some genealogical memoranda that Pope was first married to one Elizabeth Gunston, and divorced from her 11 July 1536 by Richard Gwent, Dean of Arches; but he himself recorded in a Breviary (MSS. Aubrey 31) once the property of William Appulby, perhaps the warden of Durham College, his marriage on 17 July 1536 to

1 I have discussed this unpleasant subject in an elaborate article in the Engl. Hist. Review for April 1896, and will only say here, (1) that these narratives are not now and never were to be found in the charred MS. of Machyn, that they were not known to Strype, that they are all improbable and some demonstrably false, and that they were published at intervals and with different explanations; (2) that Warton rather than Wise, who died before Warton's Life appeared in 1772, must be considered the fabricator of them, partly from his misstatements about the condition of the MS., partly from the suppression of this part of his (or Wise's) notes, partly from his habit of referring in detail to books which do not bear out his statements, and partly because there is grave reason to suspect him of similar fabrications of passages alleged to be extracted from letters or documents in the possession of the College, one at least of which contains a slight but certain anachronism. In fact all the statements which Warton makes on his own authority or on that of "MSS. F. Wise," or "the late Sir Harry Pope Blount," must be discredited, except in a very few cases where there is extant corroboration. Ritson charged him with similar inventions in his History of English Poetry.