ed for high
treason on various charges.

* * * * *

Ralph was not altogether happy as May drew on. There began to be signs
that his master's policy with regard to the Cleves alliance was losing
ground in the councils of the State; but Cromwell himself seemed to
acquiesce, so it appeared as if his own mind was beginning to change.
There was a letter to Pate, the ambassador to the Emperor, that Ralph
had to copy one day, and he gathered from it that conciliation was to be
used towards Charles in place of the old defiance.

But he did not see much of Parliament affairs this month.

Cromwell had told him to sort a large quantity of private papers that
had gradually accumulated in Ralph's own house at Westminster; for that
he desired the removal of most of them to his own keeping.

They were an enormous mass of documents, dealing with every sort and
kind of the huge affairs that had passed through Cromwell's hands for
the last five years. They concerned hundreds of persons, living and
dead--statesmen, nobles, the foreign Courts, priests, Religious,
farmers, tradesmen--there was scarcely a class that was not represented
there.

Ralph sat hour after hour in his chair with locked doors, sorting,
docketting, and destroying; and amazed by this startling object-lesson
of the vast work in which he had had a hand. There were secrets there
that would burst like a bomb if they were made public--intrigues,
bribes, threats, revelations; and little by little a bundle of the most
important documents accumulated on the table before him. The rest lay in
heaps on the floor.

Those that he had set aside beneath his own eye were a miscellaneous set
as regarded their contents; the only unity between them lay in the fact
that they were especially perilous to Cromwell. Ralph felt as if he were
handling gunpowder as he took them up one by one or added to the heap.

The new coronet that my Lord of Essex had lately put upon his head would
not be there another day, if these were made public. There would not be
left even a head to put it upon. Ralph knew that a great minister like
his master was bound to have a finger in very curious affairs; but he
had not recognised how exceptional these were, nor how many, until he
had the bundle of papers before him. There were cases in which persons
accused and even convicted of high treason had been set at liberty on
Cromwell's sole authority without reference to the King;