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$Title{England Breaks With The Roman Church, Destruction Of The Monasteries
Part I.}
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$Author{Green, John Richard}
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$Subject{cromwell
henry
king
new
england
church
power
policy
religious
crown}
$Date{}
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Title:       England Breaks With The Roman Church, Destruction Of The Monasteries
Author:      Green, John Richard

Part I.

1534

     Following the fall of Wolsey, Sir Thomas More became lord chancellor of
England, but the real power of Wolsey passed to another and perhaps even more
able minister, Thomas Cromwell.  Henry VIII needed always some strong, able,
crafty guide to show him a path through the intricacies of European politics,
and enable him at the same time to follow the savage dictates of his passion
and his whims.

     Such a helper he found now in Cromwell.  Few men have ever been so daring
or so ruthless as this great statesman.  He helped Henry in all his evil
schemes, though Green and other critics as well have thought to discern a
larger, wiser policy in the impenetrable mind of the subtle minister.  As
secretary of state he drove England at his own pace through the vast religious
changes of the period.  For the ruin he brought upon Catholicism, and more
especially for his destruction of the thousand monasteries that dotted
England, he has been called the "hammer of the monks." Of even lower birth
than Wolsey, and rising to almost equal power, Cromwell began life as a son of
a blacksmith.

     He wandered over Europe and especially Italy as a soldier, merchant, and
general adventurer of the lower and wilder type.  He became Wolsey's
right-hand man, and held loyally by his chief even after the latter's
overthrow.

     It had been Henry's passion for Anne Boleyn, and the resulting necessity
for divorce from his wife Catherine, that caused Wolsey's fall.  On the same
passion did Cromwell build his rise.  He secretly urged the King to break with
Rome entirely and declare himself sole head of the English Church.  Thus he
could divorce himself.  Henry first tried a last negotiation with the Pope;
that failing, he turned to his new adviser.

     Cromwell was again ready with his suggestion that the King should disavow
the papal jurisdiction, declare himself head of the Church within its realm,
and obtain a divorce from his own ecclesiastical courts.  But the new minister
looked on the divorce as simply the prelude to a series of changes which he
was bent upon accomplishing.  In all his checkered life, that had left its
deepest stamp on him in Italy.  Not only in the rapidity and ruthlessness of
his designs, but in their larger scope, their admirable combination, the
Italian statecraft entered with Cromwell into English politics.  He is in fact
the first English minister in whom we can trace through the whole period of
his rule the steady working out of a great and definite aim, that of raising
the King to absolute authority on the ruins of every rival power within his
realm.

     It was not that Cromwell was a mere slave of tyranny.  Whether we may
trust the tale that carries him in his youth to Florence or not, his
statesmanship was closely modelled on the ideal of the Florentine thinker
whose book was constantly in his hand.  Even as a servant of Wolsey he
startled the future Cardinal, Reginald Pole, by bidding him take for his
manual in politics the Prince of Machiavelli.  Machiavelli hoped to find in
Caesar Borgia or in the later Lorenzo de' Medici a tyrant who, after crushing
all rival tyrannies, might unite and regenerate Italy; and, terrible and
ruthless as his policy was, the final aim of Cromwell seems to have been that
of Machiavelli, an aim of securing enlightenment and order for England by the
concentration of all authority in the Crown.

     The first step toward such an end was the freeing the monarchy from its
spiritual obedience to Rome.  What the first of the Tudors had done for the
political independence of the kingdom, the second was to do for its
ecclesiastical independence.  Henry VII had freed England from the
interference of France or the house of Burgundy; and in the question of the
divorce Cromwell saw the means of bringing Henry VIII to free it from the
interference of the papacy.  In such an effort resistance could be looked for
only from the clergy.  But their resistance was what Cromwell desired.  The
last check on royal absolutism which had survived the Wars of the Roses lay in
the wealth, the independent synods and jurisdiction, and the religious claims
of the Church; and for the success of the new policy it was necessary to
reduce the great ecclesiastical body to a mere department of the state in
which all authority should flow from the sovereign alone, his will be the only
law, his decision the only test of truth.

     Such a change, however, was hardly to be wrought without a struggle; and
the question of national independence in all ecclesiastical matters furnished
ground on which the Crown could conduct this struggle to the best advantage.
The secretary's first blow showed how unscrupulously the struggle was to be
waged.  A year had passed since Wolsey had been convicted of a breach of the
Statute of Provisors.  The pedantry of the judges declared the whole nation to
have been formally involved in the same charge by its acceptance of his
authority.  The legal absurdity was now redressed by a general pardon, but
from this pardon the clergy found themselves omitted.  In the spring of 1531 a
convocation was assembled to be told that forgiveness could be bought at no
less a price than the payment of a fine amounting to a million of our present
money, and the acknowledgment of the King as "the chief protector, the only
and supreme lord, and head of the Church and clergy of England."

     Unjust as was the first demand, they at once submitted to it; against the
second they struggled hard.  But their appeals to Henry and Cromwell met only
with demands for instant obedience.  A compromise was at last arrived at by
the insertion of a qualifying phrase, "So far as the law of Christ will
allow"; and with this addition the words were again submitted by Warham to the
convocation.  There was a general silence.  "Whoever is silent seems to
consent," said the Archbishop.  "Then are we all silent," replied a voice from
among the crowd.

     There is no ground for thinking that the "headship of the Church" which
Henry claimed in this submission was more than a warning addressed to the
independent spirit of the clergy, or that it bore as yet the meaning which was
afterward attached to it.  It certainly implied no independence of Rome, for
negotiations were still being carried on with the papal court.  But it told
Clement plainly that in any strife that might come between himself and Henry
the clergy were in the King's hand, and that he must look for no aid from them
in any struggle with the Crown.  The warning was backed by an address to the
Pope from the lords and some of the commons who assembled after a fresh
prorogation of the houses in the spring.

     "The cause of his majesty," the peers were made to say," is the cause of
each of ourselves." They laid before the Pope what they represented as the
judgment of the universities in favor of the divorce; but they faced boldly
the event of its rejection.  "Our condition," they ended, "will not be wholly
irremediable.  Extreme remedies are ever harsh of application; but he that is
sick will by all means be rid of his distemper." In the summer the banishment
of Catherine from the King's palace to a house at Ampthill showed the firmness
of Henry's resolve.  Each of these acts was no doubt intended to tell on the
Pope's decision, for Henry still clung to the hope of extorting from Clement a
favorable answer; and at the close of the year a fresh embassy, with Gardiner,
now Bishop of Winchester, at its head, was despatched to the papal court.  But
the embassy failed like its predecessors, and at the opening of 1532 Cromwell
was free to take more decisive steps in the course on which he had entered.

     What the nature of his policy was to be, had already been detected by
eyes as keen as his own.  More had seen in Wolsey's fall an opening for the
realization of those schemes of religious and even of political reform on
which the scholars of the New Learning had long been brooding.  The
substitution of the lords of the council for the autocratic rule of the
cardinal-minister, the break-up of the great mass of powers which had been
gathered into a single hand, the summons of a parliament, the ecclesiastical
reforms which it at once sanctioned, were measures which promised a more legal
and constitutional system of government.  The question of the divorce
presented to More no serious difficulty.  Untenable as Henry's claim seemed to
the new Chancellor, his faith in the omnipotence of parliament would have
enabled him to submit to any statute which named a new spouse as queen and her
children as heirs to the crown.  But as Cromwell's policy unfolded itself he
saw that more than this was impending.

     The Catholic instinct of his mind, the dread of a rent Christendom and of
the wars and bigotry that must come of its rending, united with More's
theological convictions to resist any spiritual severance of England from the
papacy.  His love for freedom, his revolt against the growing autocracy of the
Crown, the very height and grandeur of his own spiritual convictions, all bent
him to withstand a system which would concentrate in the king the whole power
of church as of state, would leave him without the one check that remained on
his despotism, and make him arbiter of the religious faith of his subjects.
The later revolt of the Puritans against the king-worship which Cromwell
established proved the justice of the provision which forced More in the
spring of 1532 to resign the post of chancellor.

     But the revolution from which he shrank was an inevitable one.  Till now
every Englishman had practically owned a double life and a double allegiance.
As citizen of a temporal state his life was bounded by English shores, and his
loyalty due exclusively to his English King.  But as citizen of the state
spiritual, he belonged not to England, but to Christendom.  The law which
governed him was not a national law, but a law that embraced every European
nation, and the ordinary course of judicial appeals in ecclesiastical cases
proved to him that the sovereignty in all matters of conscience or religion
lay, not at Westminster, but at Rome.

     Such a distinction could scarcely fail to bring embarrassment with it as
the sense of national life and national pride waxed stronger; and from the
reign of the Edwards the problem of reconciling the spiritual and temporal
relations of the realm grew daily more difficult.  Parliament had hardly risen
into life when it became the organ of the national jealousy, whether of any
papal jurisdiction without the realm or of the separate life and separate
jurisdiction of the clergy within it.  The movement was long arrested by
religious reaction and civil war.  But the fresh sense of national greatness
which sprang from the policy of Henry VIII, the fresh sense of national unity
as the monarchy gathered all power into its single hand, would have itself
revived the contest even without the spur of the divorce.

     What the question of the divorce really did was to stimulate the movement
by bringing into clearer view the wreck of the great Christian commonwealth of
which England had till now formed a part, and the impossibility of any real
exercise of a spiritual sovereignty over it by the weakened papacy, as well as
by outraging the national pride through the summons of the King to a foreign
bar and the submission of English interests to the will of a foreign emperor.

     With such a spur as this the movement, which More dreaded, moved forward
as quickly as Cromwell desired.  The time had come when England was to claim
for herself the fulness of power, ecclesiastical as well as temporal, within
her bounds; and, in the concentration of all authority within the hands of the
sovereign which was the political characteristic of the time, to claim this
power for the nation was to claim it for the king.  The import of that
headship of the Church which Henry had assumed in the preceding year was
brought fully out in one of the propositions laid before the convocation of
1532.

     "The King's majesty," runs this memorable clause, "hath as well the care
of the souls of his subjects as their bodies; and may by the law of God by his
parliament make laws touching and concerning as well the one as the other."
The principle embodied in these words was carried out in a series of decisive
measures.  Under strong pressure the convocation was brought to pray that the
power of independent legislation till now exercised by the church should come
to an end, and to promise "that from henceforth we shall forbear to enact,
promulge, or put into execution any such constitutions and ordinances so by us
to be made in time coming, unless your highness by your royal assent shall
license us to make, promulge, and execute them, and the same so made be
approved by your highness' authority."

     Rome was dealt with in the same unsparing fashion.  The parliament
forbade by statute any further appeals to the papal court; and on a petition
from the clergy in convocation the houses granted power to the King to suspend
the payments of first-fruits, or the year's revenue which each bishop paid to
Rome on his election to a see.  All judicial, all financial connection with
the papacy was broken by these two measures.  The last, indeed, was as yet but
a menace which Henry might use in his negotiations with Clement.  The hope
which had been entertained of aid from Charles was now abandoned; and the
overthrow of Norfolk and his policy of alliance with the Empire was seen at
the midsummer of 1532 in the conclusion of a league with France.  Cromwell had
fallen back on Wolsey's system; and the divorce was now to be looked for from
the united pressure of the French and English kings on the papal court.

     But the pressure was as unsuccessful as before.  In November Clement
threatened the King with excommunication if he did not restore Catherine to
her place as queen and abstain from all intercourse with Anne Boleyn till the
case was tried.  But Henry still refused to submit to the judgment of any
court outside his realm; and the Pope, ready as he was with evasion and delay,
dared not alienate Charles by consenting to a trial within it.  The lavish
pledges which Francis had given in an interview during the preceding summer
may have aided to spur the King to a decisive step which closed the long
debate.  At the opening of 1533 Henry was privately married to Anne Boleyn.
The match, however, was carefully kept secret while the papal sanction was
being gained for the appointment of Cranmer to the see of Canterbury, which
had become vacant by Archbishop Warham's death in the preceding year.  But
Cranmer's consecration at the close of March was the signal for more open
action, and Cromwell's policy was at last brought fairly into play.

     The new primate at once laid the question of the King's marriage before
the two houses of convocation, and both voted that the license of Pope Julius
had been beyond the papal powers and that the marriage which it authorized was
void.  In May the King's suit was brought before the Archbishop in his court
at Dunstable; his judgment annulled the marriage with Catherine as void from
the beginning, and pronounced the marriage with Anne Boleyn, which her
pregnancy had forced Henry to reveal, a lawful marriage.  A week later the
hand of Cranmer placed upon Anne's brow the crown which she had coveted so
long.

     "There was much murmuring" at measures such as these.  Many thought "that
the Bishop of Rome would curse all Englishmen, and that the Emperor and he
would destroy all the people." Fears of the overthrow of religion told on the
clergy; the merchants dreaded an interruption of the trade with Flanders,
Italy, and Spain.  But Charles, though still loyal to his aunt's cause, had no
mind to incur risks for her; and Clement, though he annulled Cranmer's
proceedings, hesitated as yet to take sterner action.  Henry, on the other
hand, conscious that the die was thrown, moved rapidly forward in the path
that Cromwell had opened.  The Pope's reversal of the primate's judgment was
answered by an appeal to a general council.  The decision of the cardinals to
whom the case was referred in the spring of 1534, a decision which asserted
the lawfulness of Catherine's marriage, was met by the enforcement of the
long-suspended statute forbidding the payment of first-fruits to the Pope.

     Though the King was still firm in his resistance to Lutheran opinions,
and at this moment endeavored to prevent by statute the importation of
Lutheran books, the less scrupulous hand of his minister was seen already
striving to find a counterpoise to the hostility of the Emperor in an alliance
with the Lutheran princes of North Germany.  Cromwell was now fast rising to a
power which rivalled Wolsey's.  His elevation to the post of lord privy seal
placed him on a level with the great nobles of the council board; and Norfolk,
constant in his hopes of reconciliation with Charles and the papacy, saw his
plans set aside for the wider and more daring projects of "the blacksmith's
son." Cromwell still clung to the political engine whose powers he had turned
to the service of the Crown.  The parliament which had been summoned at
Wolsey's fall met steadily year after year; and measure after measure had
shown its accordance with the royal will in the strife with Rome.

     It was now called to deal a final blow.  Step by step the ground had been
cleared for the great statute by which the new character of the English Church
was defined in the session of 1534.  By the Act of Supremacy authority in all
matters ecclesiastical was vested solely in the Crown.  The courts spiritual
became as thoroughly the King's courts as the temporal courts at Westminster.
The statute ordered that the King "shall be taken, accepted, and reputed the
only supreme head on earth of the Church of England, and shall have and enjoy,
annexed and united to the imperial crown of this realm, as well the title and
state thereof as all the honors, jurisdictions, authorities, immunities,
profits, and commodities to the said dignity belonging, with full power to
visit, repress, redress, reform, and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses,
contempts, and enormities which by any manner of spiritual authority or
jurisdiction might or may lawfully be reformed."

     The full import of the Act of Supremacy was only seen in the following
year.  At the opening of 1535 Henry formally took the title of "on earth
Supreme Head of the Church of England," and some months later Cromwell was
raised to the post of vicar-general, or vicegerent of the King in all matters
ecclesiastical.  His title, like his office, recalled the system of Wolsey. It
was not only as legate, but in later years as vicar-general, of the Pope, that
Wolsey had brought all spiritual causes in England to an English court. The
supreme ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the realm passed into the hands of a
minister who as chancellor already exercised its supreme civil jurisdiction.
The papal power had therefore long seemed transferred to the crown before the
legislative measures which followed the divorce actually transferred it.

     It was in fact the system of Catholicism itself that trained men to look
without surprise on the concentration of all spiritual and secular authority
in Cromwell.  Successor to Wolsey as keeper of the great seal, it seemed
natural enough that Cromwell should succeed him also as vicar-general of the
Church, and that the union of the two powers should be restored in the hands
of a minister of the King.  But the mere fact that these powers were united in
the hands, not of a priest, but of a layman, showed the new drift of the royal
policy.  The Church was no longer to be brought indirectly under the royal
power; in the policy of Cromwell it was to be openly laid prostrate at the
foot of the throne.

     And this policy his position enabled him to carry out with a terrible
thoroughness.  One great step toward its realization had already been taken in
the statute which annihilated the free legislative powers of the convocations
of the clergy.  Another followed in an act which, under the pretext of
restoring the free election of bishops, turned every prelate into a nominee of
the King.  The election of bishops by the chapters of their cathedral churches
had long become formal, and their appointment had since the time of the
Edwards been practically made by the papacy on the nomination of the crown.
The privilege of free election was now with bitter irony restored to the
chapters, but they were compelled on pain of praemunire to choose whatever
candidate was recommended by the king.  This strange expedient has lasted till
the present time, though its character has wholly changed with the development
of constitutional rule.

     The nomination of bishops has ever since the accession of the Georges
passed from the king in person to the minister, who represents the will of the
people.  Practically, therefore, an English prelate, alone among all the
prelates of the world, is now raised to his episcopal throne by the same
popular election which raised Ambrose to his episcopal chair at Milan.  But at
the moment of the change Cromwell's measure reduced the English bishops to
absolute dependence on the crown.  Their dependence would have been complete
had his policy been thoroughly carried out, and the royal power of deposition
put in force, as well as that of appointment.  As it was, Henry could warn the
Archbishop of Dublin that, if he persevered in his "proud folly, we be able to
remove you again and to put another man of more virtue and honesty in your
place." By the more ardent partisans of the Reformation this dependence of the
bishops on the crown was fully recognized.  On the death of Henry VIII Cranmer
took out a new commission from Edward for the exercise of his office.
Latimer, when the royal policy clashed with his belief, felt bound to resign
the see of Worcester.  If the power of deposition was quietly abandoned by
Elizabeth, the abandonment was due, not so much to any deference for the
religious instincts of the nation as to the fact that the steady servility of
the bishops rendered its exercise unnecessary.

     A second step in Cromwell's policy followed hard on this enslavement of
the episcopate.  Master of convocation, absolute master of the bishops, Henry
had become master of the monastic orders through the right of visitation over
them, which had been transferred by the Act of Supremacy from the papacy to
the crown.  The monks were soon to know what this right of visitation implied
in the hands of the vicar-general.  As an outlet for religious enthusiasm,
monasticism was practically dead.  The friar, now that his fervor of devotion
and his intellectual energy had passed away, had sunk into a mere beggar. The
monks had become mere landowners.  Most of the religious houses were anxious
only to enlarge their revenues and to diminish the number of those who shared
them.

     In the general carelessness which prevailed as to the spiritual objects
of their trust, in the wasteful management of their estates, in the indolence
and self-indulgence which for the most part characterized them, the monastic
establishments simply exhibited the faults of all corporate bodies that have
outlived the work which they were created to perform.  They were no more
unpopular, however, than such corporate bodies generally are.  The Lollard cry
for their suppression had died away.  In the north, where some of the greatest
abbeys were situated, the monks were on good terms with the country gentry,
and their houses served as schools for their children; nor is there any sign
of a different feeling elsewhere.

     But they had drawn on themselves at once the hatred of the New Learning
and of the monarchy.  In the early days of the revival of letters, popes and
bishops had joined with princes and scholars in welcoming the diffusion of
culture and the hopes of religious reform.  But, though an abbot or a prior
here or there might be found among the supporters of the movement, the
monastic orders as a whole repelled it with unswerving obstinacy.  The quarrel
only became more bitter as years went on.  The keen sarcasms of Erasmus, the
insolent buffoonery of Hutten, were lavished on the "lovers of darkness" and
of the cloister.

     In England Colet and More echoed with greater reserve the scorn and
invective of their friends.  The monarchy had other causes for its hate.  In
Cromwell's system there was no room for either the virtues or the vices of
monasticism, for its indolence and superstition, or for its independence of
the throne.  The bold stand which the monastic orders had made against
benevolences had never been forgiven, while the revenues of their foundations
offered spoil vast enough to fill the royal treasury and secure a host of
friends for the new reforms.  Two royal commissioners, therefore, were
despatched on a general visitation of the religious houses, and their reports
formed a "Black Book" which was laid before parliament in 1536.

     It was acknowledged that about a third of the houses, including the bulk
of the larger abbeys, were fairly and decently conducted.  The rest were
charged with drunkenness, with simony, and with the foulest and most revolting
crimes.  The character of the visitors, the sweeping nature of their report,
and the long debate which followed on its reception leave little doubt that
these charges were grossly exaggerated.  But the want of any effective
discipline which had resulted from their exemption from all but papal
supervision told fatally against monastic morality even in abbeys like St.
Albans; and the acknowledgment of Warham, as well as a partial measure of
suppression begun by Wolsey, goes some way to prove that, in the smaller
houses at least, indolence had passed into crime.

     A cry of "down with them" broke from the commons as the report was read.
The country, however, was still far from desiring the utter downfall of the
monastic system, and a long and bitter debate was followed by a compromise
which suppressed all houses whose income fell below two hundred pounds a year.
Of the thousand religious houses which then existed in England, nearly four
hundred were dissolved under this act and their revenues granted to the crown.

     The secular clergy alone remained; and injunction after injunction from
the vicar-general taught rector and vicar that they must learn to regard
themselves as mere mouth-pieces of the royal will.  The Church was gagged.
With the instinct of genius, Cromwell discerned the part which the pulpit, as
the one means which then existed of speaking to the people at large, was to
play in the religious and political struggle that was at hand; and he resolved
to turn it to the profit of the monarchy.

     The restriction of the right of preaching to priests who received
licenses from the Crown silenced every voice of opposition.  Even to those who
received these licenses theological controversy was forbidden; and a
high-handed process of "tuning the pulpits," by express directions as to the
subject and tenor of each special discourse, made the preachers at every
crisis mere means of diffusing the royal will.  As a first step in this
process every bishop, abbot, and parish priest was required by the new
vicar-general to preach against the usurpation of the papacy, and to proclaim
the King as supreme head of the Church on earth.  The very topics of the
sermon were carefully prescribed; the bishops were held responsible for the
compliance of the clergy with these orders; and the sheriffs were held
responsible for the obedience of the bishops.

     While the great revolution which struck down the Church was in progress,
England looked silently on.  In all the earlier ecclesiastical changes, in the
contest over the papal jurisdiction and papal exactions, in the reform of the
church courts, even in the curtailment of the legislative independence of the
clergy, the nation as a whole had gone with the King.  But from the
enslavement of the priesthood, from the gagging of the pulpits, from the
suppression of the monasteries, the bulk of the nation stood aloof.  There
were few voices, indeed, of protest.  As the royal policy disclosed itself, as
the monarchy trampled under foot the tradition and reverence of ages gone by,
as its figure rose bare and terrible out of the wreck of old institutions,
England simply held her breath.

     It is only through the stray depositions of royal spies that we catch a
glimpse of the wrath and hate which lay seething under this silence of the
people.  For the silence was a silence of terror.  Before Cromwell's rise, and
after his fall from power, the reign of Henry VIII witnessed no more than the
common tyranny and bloodshed of the time.  But the years of Cromwell's
administration form the one period in our history which deserves the name that
men have given to the rule of Robespierre.  It was the English "Terror." It
was by terror that Cromwell mastered the King.  Cranmer could plead for him at
a later time with Henry as "one whose surety was only by your majesty, who
loved your majesty, as I ever thought, no less than God." But the attitude of
Cromwell toward the King was something more than that of absolute dependence
and unquestioning devotion.

     He was "so vigilant to preserve your majesty from all treasons," adds the
primate, "that few could be so secretly conceived but he detected the same
from the beginning." Henry, like every Tudor, was fearless of open danger, but
tremulously sensitive to the lightest breath of hidden disloyalty; and it was
on this dread that Cromwell based the fabric of his power.  He was hardly
secretary before spies were scattered broadcast over the land.  Secret
denunciations poured into the open ear of the minister. The air was thick with
tales of plots and conspiracies; and with the detection and suppression of
each, Cromwell tightened his hold on the King.

     As it was by terror that he mastered the King, so it was by terror that
he mastered the people.  Men felt in England, to use the figure by which
Erasmus paints the time, "as if a scorpion lay sleeping under every stone."
The confessional had no secrets for Cromwell.  Men's talk with their closest
friends found its way to his ear.  "Words idly spoken," the murmurs of a
petulant abbot, the ravings of a moon-struck nun, were, as the nobles cried
passionately at his fall, "tortured into treason." The only chance of safety
lay in silence.

     "Friends who used to write and send me presents," Erasmus tells us, "now
send neither letter nor gifts, nor receive any from anyone, and this through
fear." But even the refuge of silence was closed by a law more infamous than
any that has ever blotted the statute-book of England.  Not only was thought
made treason, but men were forced to reveal their thoughts on pain of their
very silence being punished with the penalties of treason.  All trust in the
older bulwarks of liberty was destroyed by a policy as daring as it was
unscrupulous.  The noblest institutions were degraded into instruments of
terror.  Though Wolsey had strained the law to the utmost, he had made no open
attack on the freedom of justice.  If he shrank from assembling parliaments,
it was from his sense that they were the bulwarks of liberty.

     But under Cromwell the coercion of juries and the management of judges
rendered the courts mere mouth-pieces of the royal will; and where even this
shadow of justice proved an obstacle to bloodshed, parliament was brought into
play to pass bill after bill of attainder.  "He shall be judged by the bloody
laws he has himself made," was the cry of the council at the moment of his
fall, and by a singular retribution the crowning injustice which he sought to
introduce even into the practice of attainder, the condemnation of a man
without hearing his defence, was only practised on himself.

     But, ruthless as was the "Terror" of Cromwell, it was of a nobler type
than the Terror of France.  He never struck uselessly or capriciously, or
stooped to the meaner victims of the guillotine.  His blows were effective
just because he chose his victims from among the noblest and the best.  If he
struck at the Church, it was through the Carthusians, the holiest and the most
renowned of English churchmen.  If he struck at the baronage, it was through
Lady Salisbury, in whose veins flowed the blood of kings.  If he struck at the
New Learning, it was through the murder of Sir Thomas More. But no personal
vindictiveness mingled with his crime.

     In temper, indeed, so far as we can judge from the few stories which
lingered among his friends, he was a generous, kindly hearted man, with
pleasant and winning manners which atoned for a certain awkwardness of person,
and with a constancy of friendship which won him a host of devoted adherents.
But no touch either of love or hate swayed him from his course. The student of
Machiavelli had not studied the Prince in vain.  He had reduced bloodshed to a
system.  Fragments of his papers still show us with what a business-like
brevity he ticked off human lives among the casual "remembrances" of the day.

     "Item, the Abbot of Reading to be sent down to be tried and executed at
Reading." "Item, to know the King's pleasure touching Master More." "Item,
when Master Fisher shall go to his execution, and the other." It is indeed
this utter absence of all passion, of all personal feeling, that makes the
figure of Cromwell the most terrible in our history.  He has an absolute faith
in the end he is pursuing, and he simply hews his way to it as a woodman hews
his way through the forest, axe in hand.

     The choice of his first victim showed the ruthless precision with which
Cromwell was to strike.  In the general opinion of Europe, the foremost
Englishman of the time was Sir Thomas More.  As the policy of the divorce
ended in an open rupture with Rome, he had withdrawn silently from the
ministry, but his silent disapproval of the new policy was more telling than
the opposition of obscurer foes.  To Cromwell there must have been something
specially galling in More's attitude of reserve.  The religious reforms of the
New Learning were being rapidly carried out, but it was plain that the man who
represented the very life of the New Learning believed that the sacrifice of
liberty and justice was too dear a price to pay even for religious reform.

     In the actual changes which the divorce brought about, there was nothing
to move More to active or open opposition.  Though he looked on the divorce
and remarriage as without religious warrant, he found no difficulty in
accepting an act of succession passed in 1534 which declared the marriage of
Anne Boleyn valid, annulled the title of Catherine's child, Mary, and declared
the children of Anne the only lawful heirs to the crown.  His faith in the
power of parliament over all civil matters was too complete to admit a doubt
of its competence to regulate the succession to the throne.  But by the same
act an oath recognizing the succession as then arranged was ordered to be
taken by all persons; and this oath contained an acknowledgment that the
marriage with Catherine was against Scripture, and invalid from the beginning.

     Henry had long known More's belief on this point; and the summons to take
this oath was simply a summons to death.  More was at his house at Chelsea
when the summons called him to Lambeth, to the house where he had bandied fun
with Warham and Erasmus or bent over the easel of Holbein.  For a moment there
may have been some passing impulse to yield.  But it was soon over.
Triumphant in all else, the monarchy was to find its power stop short at the
conscience of man.  The great battle of spiritual freedom, the battle of the
Protestant against Mary, of the Catholic against Elizabeth, of the Puritan
against Charles, of the Independent against the Presbyterian, began at the
moment when More refused to bend or to deny his convictions at a king's
bidding.

     "I thank the Lord," More said with a sudden start as the boat dropped
silently down the river from his garden steps in the early morning, "I thank
the Lord that the field is won." At Lambeth, Cranmer and his
fellow-commissioners tendered to him the new oath of allegiance; but, as they
expected, it was refused.  They bade him walk in the garden, that he might
reconsider his reply.  The day was hot, and More seated himself in a window
from which he could look down into the crowded court.  Even in the presence of
death, the quick sympathy of his nature could enjoy the humor and life of the
throng below.

     "I saw," he said afterward, "Master Latimer very merry in the court, for
he laughed and took one or twain by the neck so handsomely that if they had
been women I should have weened that he waxed wanton." The crowd below was
chiefly of priests, rectors, and vicars, pressing to take the oath that More
found harder than death.  He bore them no grudge for it.  When he heard the
voice of one who was known to have boggled hard at the oath, a little while
before, calling loudly and ostentatiously for drink, he only noted him with
his peculiar humor.  "He drank," More supposed, "either from dryness or from
gladness," or "to show quod ille notus erat Pontifici."

     He was called in again at last, but only repeated his refusal.  It was in
vain that Cranmer plied him with distinctions which perplexed even the subtle
wit of the ex-chancellor; More remained unshaken and passed to the Tower.  He
was followed there by Bishop Fisher of Rochester, the most aged and venerable
of the English prelates, who was charged with countenancing treason by
listening to the prophecies of a religious fanatic called the "Nun of Kent."
But for the moment even Cromwell shrank from their blood.  They remained
prisoners, while a new and more terrible engine was devised to crush out the
silent but widespread opposition to the religious changes.

     By a statute passed at the close of 1534 a new treason was created in the
denial of the King's titles; and in the opening of 1535 Henry assumed, as we
have seen, the title of "on earth supreme head of the Church of England." The
measure was at once followed up by a blow at victims hardly less venerable
than More.  In the general relaxation of the religious life, the charity and
devotion of the brethren of the Charter-house had won the reverence even of
those who condemned monasticism.  After a stubborn resistance they had
acknowledged the royal supremacy and taken the oath of submission prescribed
by the act.  But, by an infamous construction of the statute which made the
denial of the supremacy treason, the refusal of satisfactory answers to
official questions, as to a conscientious belief in it, was held to be
equivalent to open denial.

     The aim of the new measure was well known, and the brethren prepared to
die.  In the agony of waiting, enthusiasm brought its imaginative
consolations; "when the host was lifted up, there came as it were a whisper of
air which breathed upon our faces as we knelt; and there came a sweet, soft
sound of music." They had not long, however, to wait, for their refusal to
answer was the signal for their doom.  Three of the brethren went to the
gallows; the rest were flung into Newgate, chained to posts in a noisome
dungeon, where, "tied and not able to stir," they were left to perish of jail
fever and starvation.  In a fortnight five were dead and the rest at the point
of death, "almost despatched," Cromwell's envoy wrote to him, "by the hand of
God, of which, considering their behavior, I am not sorry."