The laity of England had refused to apostatise; the fautor of his schemes was dead; and then, then, as a last miserable alternative, he dropped from his ambitious height back into the foul slough of avarice, and plied all the arts of threat and of falsehood to reconfiscate the revenues of the see of Canterbury, and figured once more not as head of the Church, not as source of jurisdiction, not as lord of all, but merely as a croned robber.
Source: wiktionary