Kingston, commanding him to examine the cardinal, and discover where this money was deposited. The commission would have been immediately executed, but the weakness of the cardinal was so great, and increased so rapidly, that Kingston was obliged to put off the examination till the next day. The same night Wolsey was very sick, and swooned often, but rallied a little at four the next morning. About seven Kingston entered the room, intending to fulfill the king's command respecting the money. But seeing the feeble condition of the patient, he endeavored to encourage him with the usual topic, telling the cardinal he was sad and pensive from dread of that which he had no occasion to apprehend.

"Well, well, Master Kingston," replied Wolsey, "I see the matter against me, how it is framed; but if I had served God as diligently as I have served the king, he would not have given me over in my gray hairs. Howbeit, this is the just reward that I must receive for my worldly diligence and pains that I have had to do him service. Commend me to his najesty, beseeching him to call to his remembrance all that has passed between him and me to the present day, and most chiefly in his great matter; then shall his conscience declare whether I have offended him or no. He is a prince

of royal courage, and hath a princely heart; and rather than he will miss or want part of his appetite he will hazard the loss of one half of his kingdom. I assure you I have often kneeled before him in his privy chamber, the space of an hour or two, to persuade him from his will and appetite, but I could never dissuade him." Then his words and his voice failed him. His eyes grew fixed and glazed. Incontinently the clock struck eight, and he breathed his last. "And calling to our remembrance," says Cavendish, "his words the day before, how he said that at eight of the clock we should lose our master, we stood looking upon each other, supposing he had prophesied of his departure."

As the lieutenant of the Tower had now no further charge,

and was anxious to be gone, the burial was fixed for the next day. The body was placed in a rude coffin of wood, with miter, cross, and ring, and other archiepiscopal ornaments. He lay in state until five o'clock in the afternoon, when he was carried down into the church, with great solemnity, by the abbot and convent, with many torches. Here the body rested all night in the Lady Chapel, watched by four men holding lights in their hands, while the convent chanted the old and solemn office for the dead. About four in the morning, while it was yet dark, they sung a mass. By six they had laid him in his grave, on that cold and dreary November morning, unwept and unlamented by all, except by the very few who, for the glory of human nature, amid so much of baseness, greed, ingratitude, and cruelty, remained loving and faithful to the last.

XXXI.

THE ENGLISH TERROR.-GREEN.

to break the con

[After the fall of Wolsey, events marched rapidly in England. The king, impatient of the delays of the Papal Court in granting the divorce, determined to take matters into his own hand. Statute after statute was enacted in quick succession by the "Reformation Parliament nection between England and the Church of Rome. Thomas Cromwell became Henry's chief adviser, and was made "vicar-general." He forced the clergy to accept the king as Supreme Head of the Church of England, destroyed the great and wealthy monasteries, and ruled the country with an iron hand. But in 1540 he was overthrown, and executed on a charge of treason.]

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 the Eighth 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. 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."

Cranmer could

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,

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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 moonstruck 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 any one, 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-piece of injustice which he sought to introduce even into the practice of attainder, the condemnation of a man without hearing his defense, was only practiced 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 guil

lotine. 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, ax in hand.

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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 his 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 far more telling than the opposition of obscurer foes. To Cromwell there must have been something