orable revolution.

We have seen how that great insurrection of human intelligence was
headed in Germany by Luther, and we shall shortly consider it in
Switzerland and France under Calvin. We have now to contemplate the
movement in England.

The most striking figure in it was doubtless Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop
of Canterbury, although he does not represent the English Reformation
in all its phases. He was neither so prominent nor so great a man as
Luther or Calvin, or even Knox. But, taking him all in all, he was the
most illustrious of the English reformers; and he, more than any other
man, gave direction to the spirit of reform, which had been quietly
working ever since the time of Wyclif, especially among the
humbler classes.

The English Reformation--the way to which had been long preparing--began
in the reign of Henry VIII.; and this unscrupulous and tyrannical
monarch, without being a religious man, gave the first great impulse to
an outbreak the remote consequences of which he did not anticipate, and
with which he had no sympathy. He rebelled against the authority of the
Pope, without abjuring the Roman Catholic religion, either as to dogmas
or forms. In fact, the first great step towards reform was made, not by
Cranmer, but by Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, as the prime minister of
Henry VIII.,--a man of whom we really know the least of all the very
great statesmen of English history. It was he who demolished the
monasteries, and made war on the whole monastic system, and undermined
the papal power in England, and swept away many of the most glaring of
those abuses which disgraced the Papal Empire. Armed with the powers
which Wolsey had wielded, he directed them into a totally different
channel, so far as the religious welfare of the nation is considered,
although in his principles of government he was as absolute as
Richelieu. Like the great French statesman, he exalted the throne; but,
unlike him, he promoted the personal reign of the sovereign he served
with remarkable ability and devotion.

Thomas Cromwell, the prime minister of Henry VIII., after the fall of
Wolsey, was born in humble ranks, and was in early life a common soldier
in the wars of Italy, then a clerk in a mercantile house in Antwerp,
then a wool merchant in Middleborough, then a member of Parliament, and
was employed by Wolsey in suppressing some of the smaller monasteries.
His fidelity to his patron Wolsey, at the time of that great car