This petition led to the disgrace and punishment of the chancellor, the Earl of Southampton (Wriothesley), for having issued a commission without warrant and without consulting his fellow-executors of King Henry’s will. With Somerset’s motives for thrusting Southampton aside we are not concerned. (See Pollard, _England under the Protector Somerset_, pp. 31-33.) That he had any desire to protect the common lawyers we must not assume; but the petition itself deserves attention. The commissioners to whom Southampton had delegated judicial powers were Robert Southwell (master of the rolls), John Tregonwell, John Oliver, and Anthony Bellasyse (masters of chancery). Tregonwell, Oliver and Bellasyse were all doctors of the civil law (_Dict. Nat. Biog._).
In 1536 during the Pilgrimage of Grace one of the demands of the catholic insurgents was ‘that the common laws may have place as was used at the beginning of the reign and that no injunctions be granted unless the matter has been determined in chancery.’ This comes at the end of a long reactionary programme, which desires the restoration of the monasteries, of the papal supremacy and so forth: also the repeal of the statute ‘That no man shall not will his lands’ [Statute of Uses]. The heretical bishops [Cranmer and his like] are to be burnt; Cromwell is ‘to have condign punishment.’ Also ‘a man is to be saved by his book,’ _i.e._ there is to be no infringement of the benefit of clergy. The heresies to be suppressed are those of ‘Luther, Wyclif, Husse, Malangton, Elicampadus [Oecolampadius], Bucerus, Confessa Germaniae [Augsburg Confession], Apolugia Malanctons, the works of Tyndall, of Barnys, of Marshall, Raskell [Rastell, the printer of law books], Seynt Germayne [author of Doctor and Student] and such other heresies of Anibaptist.’ As I understand the protest against injunctions, it means that the chancery may interfere with an action at common law, only if that action is opening a question already decided in the chancery. It will be seen that in 1536 the cause of ‘the common laws’ finds itself in very queer company: illiterate, monkish and papistical company, which apparently has made a man of ‘Anibaptist.’ (For this important manifesto, see _Letters and Papers, Henry VIII._, vol. XI., pp. 506-507.)