wer
was discussed openly as a probability[173]--a result which Anne Boleyn,
who, better than any other person, knew the king's feelings, never ceased
to fear, till, a year after his disgrace, the welcome news were brought to
her that he had sunk into his long rest, where the sick load of office and
of obloquy would gall his back no more.

There was a third party in the country, unconsidered as yet, who had a part
to play in the historical drama: a party which, indeed, if any one had
known it, was the most important of all; the only one which, in a true,
high sense, was of importance at all; and for the sake of which, little as
it then appeared to be so, the whole work was to be done--composed at that
time merely of poor men, poor cobblers, weavers, carpenters, trade
apprentices, and humble artisans, men of low birth and low estate, who
might be seen at night stealing along the lanes and alleys of London,
carrying with them some precious load of books which it was death to
possess; and giving their lives gladly, if it must be so, for the brief
tenure of so dear a treasure. These men, for the present, were likely to
fare ill from the new ministry. They were the disturbers of order, the
anarchists, the men disfigured _pravitate heretica_, by monstrous
doctrines, and consequently by monstrous lives--who railed at authorities,
and dared to read New Testaments with their own eyes--who, consequently, by
their excesses and extravagances, brought discredit upon liberal opinions,
and whom moderate liberals (as they always have done, and always will do
while human nature remains itself) held it necessary for their credit's
sake to persecute, that a censorious world might learn to make no confusion
between true wisdom and the folly which seemed to resemble it. The
Protestants had not loved Wolsey, and they had no reason to love him; but
it was better to bear a fagot of dry sticks in a procession when the
punishment was symbolic, than, lashed fast to a stake in Smithfield, amidst
piles of the same fagots kindled into actual flames, to sink into a heap of
blackened dust and ashes; and before a year had passed, they would gladly
have accepted again the hated cardinal, to escape from the philosophic
mercies of Sir Thomas More. The number of English Protestants at this time
it is difficult to conjecture. The importance of such men is not to be
measured by counting heads. In 1526, they were organised into a society,
calling themselves "th