ur parties may be plainly discerned. First and most numerous were
the strict Anglicans, orthodox and royalist, comprising the greater
part of the crown-loving, priest-hating and yet, in intellectual
matters, conservative common people. Secondly, there were the pope's
followers, still strong in numbers especially among the clergy and in
the north. Their leaders were among the most high-minded of the
nation, but were also the first to be smitten by the king's wrath
which, as his satellites were always repeating in Latin proverb, meant
death. Such men were More and Fisher and the London Carthusians
executed in 1535 for refusing the oath of supremacy. Third, there were
the Lutherans, an active and intelligent minority of city merchants and
artisans, led by men of conspicuous talents and generally of high
character, like Coverdale, Kidley, and Latimer. With these leaders
were a few opportunists like Cranmer and a few Machiavellians like
Cromwell. Lastly there was a very small contingent of extremists,
Zwinglians and Anabaptists, all classed together as blasphemers and as
social agitators. Their chief notes were the variety of their opinions
and the unanimity of their persecution by all other parties. Some of
them were men of intelligible social and religious tenets; others
furnished the "lunatic fringe" of the reform movement. The
proclamation banishing them from England [Sidenote: 1538] on pain of
death merely continued the previous practice of the government.

The fall of the Cromwell ministry, if it may be so termed by modern
analogy, was followed by a government in which Henry acted as his own
prime minister. {309} He had made good his boast that if his shirt
knew his counsel he would strip it off.[1] Two of his great ministers
he had cast down for being too Catholic, one for being too Protestant.
Having procured laws enabling him to burn Romanists as traitors and
Lutherans as heretics, he established a regime of pure Anglicanism, the
only genuine Anglican Catholicism, however much it may have been
imitated in after centuries, that ever existed.

[Sidenote: Anti-protestant measures]

Measures were at once taken towards suppressing the Protestants and
their Bible. One of the first martyrs was Robert Barnes, a personal
friend of Luther. Much stir was created by the burning, some years
later, of a gentlewoman named Anne Askewe and of three men, at
Smithfield. The revulsion naturally caused by this cruelty p