elock died and was buried, though the news did not reach
England for six weeks. So he never knew how the hearts of his countrymen
had been stirred by his courage and his constancy, and that his queen
had made him a baronet and Parliament had voted him a pension of
1,000 l. a year, which was continued to his widow and to his son. But

Guarded to a soldier's grave
By the bravest of the brave,
He hath gained a nobler tomb
Than in old cathedral gloom.
Nobler mourners paid the rite
Than the crowd that craves a sight.
England's banners o'er him waved--
Dead, he keeps the realm he saved.

CONSCIENCE OR KING?

Now we come to quite another sort of hero; a man who enjoyed every day
of his life, and loved books and music and pets of all sorts; who played
with his children and made jokes with them; who held two of the greatest
offices an Englishman can hold, yet laid his head on the scaffold by
order of the king, because his conscience forbade him to swim with the
tide and to take an oath that king demanded of him. If you try, you will
find that this sort of heroism is more difficult than the other. There
is no excitement about it, and no praise. Your friends talk of you with
contempt, and call you a dreamer and a man who sacrifices his family to
his own whims. And very often the family agree with him.

* * * * *

'Verily, daughter, I never intend to pin my soul to another man's back,
for I know not whither he may hap to carry it. Some may do for favour,
and some may do for fear, and so they might carry my soul a wrong way.'

These were the words of sir Thomas More to his favourite daughter when
she came to him in prison, urging him to do as his friends had done, and
swear to acknowledge the king as head of the church instead of the pope.
All his life he had 'carried' his own soul himself, and that was no
small thing to be able to say in the reign of Henry VIII., when men's
hearts failed them for fear, not knowing from day to day what the tyrant
might demand of them.

Thomas More came of a family bred to the law, and his father, afterwards
made a knight and a judge, seems to have been kindly and pleasant, and
like his son in many ways, especially in his fondness for children. He
set great store by books and learning, and taught Thomas to love them
too. The boy was born when the Wars of the Roses were just over, and the
c