wing disapproval the course of the tyrant.
He opposed the marriage with Anne Boleyn. The day after the submission
of the clergy he resigned the great seal. He could not long avoid
further offence to his master, and his refusal to take the oath of
supremacy was the crime for which he was condemned. His behaviour
during his last days and on the scaffold was perfect. He spent his
time in severe self-discipline; he uttered eloquent words of
forgiveness of his enemies, messages of love to the daughter whom he
tenderly loved, and brave jests.

[Sidenote: Anabaptist martyrs, 1536]

But while More's passion was one that any man might envy, his courage
was shared by humbler martyrs. In the same year in which he was
beheaded thirteen Dutch Anabaptists were burnt, as he would have
approved, by the English government. Mute, inglorious Christs, they
were led like sheep to the slaughter and as lambs dumb before their
shearers. They had no eloquence, no high position, to make their words
ring from side to side of Europe and echo down the centuries; but their
meek endurance should not go unremembered.

To take More's place as chief minister Henry appointed the most
obsequious tool he could find, Thomas Cromwell. [Sidenote: Thomas
Cromwell, 1485?-1540] To good purpose this man had studied
Machiavelli's _Prince_ as a practical manual of tyranny. His most
important service to the crown was the {296} next step in the reduction
of the medieval church, the dissolution of the monasteries. [Sidenote:
Dissolution of the monasteries] Like other acts tending towards the
Reformation this was, on the whole, popular, and had been rehearsed on
a small scale on several previous occasions in English history. The
pope and the king of France taught Edward II to dissolve the
preceptories, to the number of twenty-three, belonging to the Templars;
in 1410 the Commons petitioned for the confiscation of all church
property; in 1414 the alien priories in England fell under the
animadversion of the government; their property was handed over to the
crown and they escaped only by the payment of heavy fines, by
incorporation into English orders, and by partial confiscation of their
land. The idea prevailed that mortmain had failed of its object and
that therefore the church might rightfully be relieved of her
ill-gotten gains. These were grossly exaggerated, a pamphleteer
believing that the wealth of the church amounted to half the property
of t