it is likely to have been successful.
We can form but an imperfect judgment on the merits of the case, for we
have only the sufferer's _ex parte_ complaint, and More might probably have
been able to make some counter-statement. But the illegal imprisonment
cannot be explained away, and cannot be palliated; and when a judge permits
himself to commit an act of arbitrary tyranny, we argue from the known to
the unknown, and refuse reasonably to give him credit for equity where he
was so little careful of law.

Yet a few years of misery in a prison was but an insignificant misfortune
when compared with the fate under which so many other poor men were at this
time overwhelmed. Under Wolsey's chancellorship the stake had been
comparatively idle; he possessed a remarkable power of making recantation
easy; and there is, I believe, no instance in which an accused heretic was
brought under his immediate cognisance, where he failed to arrange some
terms by which submission was made possible. With Wolsey heresy was an
error--with More it was a crime. Soon after the seals changed hands the
Smithfield fires recommenced; and, the chancellor acting in concert with
them, the bishops resolved to obliterate, in these edifying spectacles, the
recollection of their general infirmities. The crime of the offenders
varied--sometimes it was a denial of the corporal presence, more often it
was a reflection too loud to be endured on the character and habits of the
clergy; but whatever it was, the alternative lay only between abjuration
humiliating as ingenuity could make it, or a dreadful death. The hearts of
many failed them in the trial, and of all the confessors those perhaps do
not deserve the least compassion whose weakness betrayed them, who sank and
died broken-hearted. Of these silent sufferers history knows nothing. A
few, unable to endure the misery of having, as they supposed, denied their
Saviour, returned to the danger from which they had fled, and washed out
their fall in martyrdom. Latimer has told us the story of his friend
Bilney--little Bilney, or Saint Bilney,[548] as he calls him, his companion
at Cambridge, to whom he owed his own conversion. Bilney, after escaping
through Wolsey's hands in 1527, was again cited in 1529 before the Bishop
of London. Three times he refused to recant. He was offered a fourth and
last chance. The temptation was too strong, and he fell. For two years he
was hopelessly miserable; at length his braver