In January 1485 Richard intervened to prevent Foxe's appointment to the vicarage of Stepney on the ground that he was keeping company with the "great rebel, Henry ap Tuddor."

Doubtless Henry had every reason to reward his companions in exile, and to rule like Ferdinand II of Aragon by means of lawyers and churchmen rather than to trust nobles like those who had made the Wars of the Roses.

But without an intimate knowledge of Foxe's political experience and capacity he would hardly have made him his principal secretary, and soon afterwards Lord Privy Seal[4] and elected Bishop of Exeter on 29 January 1487, being consecrated on 8 April.

In 1492 he helped conclude the Peace of Etaples, and in 1493 he was chief commissioner in the negotiations for the famous commercial agreement with the Netherlands which Bacon seems to have been the first to call the Magnus Intercursus.

For these reasons rather than from any ecclesiastical scruples Foxe visited and resided in his new diocese; and he occupied Norham Castle, which he fortified and defended against a Scottish raid launched in 1497 in support of Perkin Warbeck.

The invention of that ingenious dilemma for extorting contributions from poor and rich alike is ascribed as a tradition to Morton by Francis Bacon; but the story is told in greater detail of Foxe by Erasmus, who says he had it from Sir Thomas More.

He was the chief of the ecclesiastical statesmen of Morton's school, believed in frequent parliaments, and opposed the spirited foreign policy which laymen like Surrey are supposed to have advocated.

Foxe resigned the privy seal because of Wolsey's ill-advised attempt to drive King Francis I of France out of Milan by financing an expedition led by Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, in 1516.

But in 1522, when war was again declared, he emphatically refused to bear any part of the responsibility, and in 1523 he opposed in convocation the financial demands which met with a more strenuous resistance in the House of Commons.

He expressed himself as being as anxious for the reformation of the clergy as Simeon the Righteous for the coming of the Messiah; but was too old to accomplish much himself in the way of remedying the clerical and especially the monastic depravity, licence and corruption he deplored.