its first session, were now allowed a respite of two
years, during which they might reconsider the complaints of the people, and
consult among themselves upon the conduct which they would pursue with
respect to those complaints. They availed themselves of their interval of
repose in a manner little calculated to recover the esteem which they had
forfeited, or to induce the legislature further to stay their hand. Instead
of reforming their own faults, they spent the time in making use of their
yet uncurtailed powers of persecution; and they wreaked the bitterness of
their resentment upon the unfortunate heretics, who paid with their blood
at the stake for the diminished revenues and blighted dignities of their
spiritual lords and superiors. During the later years of Wolsey's
administration, the Protestants, though threatened and imprisoned, had
escaped the most cruel consequences of their faith. Wolsey had been a
warm-hearted and genuine man, and although he had believed as earnestly as
his brother bishops, that Protestantism was a pernicious thing, destructive
alike to the institutions of the country and to the souls of mankind, his
memory can be reproached with nothing worse than assiduous but humane
efforts for the repression of it. In the three years which followed his
dismissal, a far more bloody page was written in the history of the
reformers; and under the combined auspices of Sir Thomas More's fanaticism,
and the spleen of the angry clergy, the stake re-commenced its hateful
activity. This portion of my subject requires a full and detailed
treatment; I reserve the account of it, therefore, for a separate chapter,
and proceed for the present with the progress of the secular changes.

Although, as I said, no further legislative measures were immediately
contemplated against the clergy, yet they were not permitted to forget the
alteration in their position which had followed upon Wolsey's fall; and as
they had shown in the unfortunate document which they had submitted to the
king, so great a difficulty in comprehending the nature of that alteration,
it was necessary clearly and distinctly to enforce it upon them. Until that
moment they had virtually held the supreme power in the state. The
nobility, crippled by the wars of the Roses, had sunk into the second
place; the Commons were disorganised, or incapable of a definite policy;
and the chief offices of the government had fallen as a matter of course to
the only per