d desiring them to bear witness for him that he
died in the faith of the holy Catholic church, and a faithful servant of
God and the king. He then repeated the Miserere psalm on his knees; and
when he had ended and had risen, the executioner, with an emotion which
promised ill for the manner in which his part in the tragedy would be
accomplished, begged his forgiveness. More kissed him. "Thou art to do
me the greatest benefit that I can receive," he said. "Pluck up thy
spirit, man, and be not afraid to do thine office. My neck is very
short. Take heed therefore that thou strike not awry for saving of thine
honesty." The executioner offered to tie his eyes. "I will cover them
myself," he said; and binding them in a cloth which he had brought with
him, he knelt and laid his head upon the block. The fatal stroke was
about to fall, when he signed for a moment's delay while he moved aside
his beard. "Pity that should be cut," he murmured, "that has not
committed treason." With which strange words, the strangest perhaps
ever uttered at such a time, the lips most famous through Europe for
eloquence and wisdom closed for ever.

"So," concludes his biographer, "with alacrity and spiritual joy he
received the fatal axe, which no sooner had severed the head from the
body, but his soul was carried by angels into everlasting glory, where a
crown of martyrdom was placed upon him which can never fade nor decay;
and then he found those words true which he had often spoken, that a man
may lose his head and have no harm."[463]

This was the execution of Sir Thomas More, an act which was sounded out
into the far corners of the earth, and was the world's wonder as well
for the circumstances under which it was perpetrated, as for the
preternatural composure with which it was borne. Something of his
calmness may have been due to his natural temperament, something to an
unaffected weariness of a world which in his eyes was plunging into the
ruin of the latter days. But those fair hues of sunny cheerfulness
caught their colour from the simplicity of his faith; and never was
there a Christian's victory over death more grandly evidenced than in
that last scene lighted with its lambent humour.

History will rather dwell upon the incidents of the execution than
attempt a sentence upon those who willed that it should be. It was at
once most piteous and most inevitable. The hour of retribution had come
at length, when at the hands of the Roman chu