4. For so it was, that some sticklers for the Church of Rome, having been told of the dinner which was made at the Nag's Head Tavern at such time as the election of the new Archbishop was confirmed in the Arches, raised a report that the Nag's-head Tavern was the place of the consecration. And this report was countenanced by another slander, causing it to be noised abroad and published in some seditious pamphlets, that the persons designed by the Queen for the several Bishopricks, being met at a tavern, did then and there lay hands upon one another, without form or order. The first calumny fathered on one Neale¹ once Hebrew Reader in the University of Oxford, and Chaplain unto Bishop Bonner ; which last relation were sufficient to discredit the whole tale, if there were no other evidence to disprove the same. And yet the silence of all Popish writers concerning this Nag's-head consecration during the vvhole reign of Queen Elizabeth, when it had been most material for them to insist upon it, as much discrediteth the whole figment as the author of it. The other published by Dr Nicholas Sanders, (never more truly Dr Slanders² than in that particular), in his pestilent and seditious book entitled "De Schismate Anglicano³" whose frequent falsehoods make him no fit author to be built upon in any matter of importance. Yet on the credit of these two⁴, but on the first especially, the tale of the Nag's-head consecration, being once taken up, was generally exposed to sale as one of the most vendible commodities in the writings of some Romish Priests and Jesuits, as Champneys, Fitzsimons, Parson⁵, Kellison, &c. They knew right well that nothing did more justify the Church of England in the eye of the world than that it did preserve a succession of Bishops, and consequently of all other sacred orders, in the ministration. Without which, as they would not grant it to be a Church, so could they prove it to be none by no stronger argument than that the Bishops (or the pretended Bishops rather, in their opinion) were either not consecrated at all, or not canonically consecrated as they ought to be. And for the gaining of this point, they stood most pertinaciously on the fiction of the Nag's-head Tavern, which if it could be proved, or at least believed, there was an end of the episcopal succession in the Church of England, and consequently also of the Church itself.

Note 1. Edd. 1, 2. "Keale." Ed. 3. "Weak."

Note 2. Fuller styles him, "lying Slanders," iii. 235 ; but it is not probable that this so obvious and so well deserved variation on the name remained for Fuller to discover.

Note 3. It ought to be observed that the account of the reign of Elizabeth is not by Sanders, but by a worthy continuator, Rishton.

Note 4. This might lead us to suppose that Sanders (or Rishton) asserted the Nags Head consecration; whicti is not the case. The form which the falsehood bears in the book De Schismate Anglicano is, that after an imprisoned Irish archbishop had in vain been urged to consecrate, the Protestant Bishops entered on their office without any consecration whatever (29B). It is shewn in Bramhall, iii. 47, that there was no Romish archbishop of Ireland with whom there could have been a negociation ; and that, if necessary, consecrators could readily have been procured from the Irish Church.

Note 5. Parsons did not maintain the story in print, although it is possible that he may have privately expressed a belief in it, as he lived six years after it had been first published by Holywood (or Sacrobosco) at Antwerp, in 1604. Note in Bramhall, iii. 39.