hatred of the commons was perhaps a reference to the fact that, as mentioned above in relation to the Cornish rebellion, he was blamed for the heavy burden of taxation. The Spanish ambassador, De Puebla, wrote on 27 December 1500 that “the Cardinal of England is dead, and has left no statesman behind who can be compared to him”. John Haryngton, the proctor of the English Cistercians, and therefore an opponent of Morton’s attempt to extend his jurisdiction to include exempt religious houses, including the Cistercians, said that he saw in him “nothing but the qualities of a good judge” and that in his opinion he was:a man of great learning and profound wisdom, devoted to the service of God, concerned for the public welfare rather than for his own advantage, immersing himself profitably in both religious and secular affairs, and not shrinking from the heat and burden of the day.Morton left money in his will to pay for the maintenance of twenty poor scholars at Oxford University and ten poor scholars at Cambridge University for twenty years. He made provision for masses to be said for the salvation of his soul for twenty years and he left 1,000 marks to be distributed as alms for the poor. His closeness to the royal family is demonstrated by the bequests of his best portable breviary to Henry VII, his best psalter to the queen, an image of the Blessed Virgin in gold to the king’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, and a gold goblet and £40 to the king’s eldest daughter, Princess Margaret, whom he described as his “beloved god-daughter”. In addition, he left a year’s wages to his lay servants. He died in possession of extensive estates which were mainly left to his relatives but he left lands in the park of Mote, near Maidstone, and the mill adjacent to this park, to the cathedral of Canterbury. Morton asked that he be buried under a plain marble slab before the statue of the Virgin known as Our Lady of Undercroft in Canterbury Cathedral. After the pavement became cracked and broken, parts of his body were taken away and his skull is now in the keeping of Stonyhurst College. The books that are known to have belonged to Morton are mainly works of canon and civil law although they include Seneca’s letters and works on oratory and rhetoric. Giovanni Gigli, a humanist