rom the block. Virtue and
learning could not save Thomas More; royal descent could not save Lady
Salisbury. The putting away of one queen, the execution of another, taught
England that nothing was too high for Henry's "courage" or too sacred for
his "appetite." Parliament assembled only to sanction acts of unscrupulous
tyranny, or to build up by its own statutes the fabric of absolute rule.
All the constitutional safeguards of English freedom were swept away.
Arbitrary taxation, arbitrary legislation, arbitrary imprisonment were
powers claimed without dispute and unsparingly used by the Crown.

The history of this great revolution, for it is nothing less, is the
history of a single man. In the whole line of English statesmen there is
no one of whom we would willingly know so much, no one of whom we really
know so little, as of Thomas Cromwell. When he meets us in Henry's service
he had already passed middle life; and during his earlier years it is
hardly possible to do more than disentangle a few fragmentary facts from
the mass of fable which gathered round them. His youth was one of roving
adventure. Whether he was the son of a poor blacksmith at Putney or no, he
could hardly have been more than a boy when he was engaged in the service
of the Marchioness of Dorset, and he must still have been young when he
took part as a common soldier in the wars of Italy, a "ruffian," as he
owned afterwards to Cranmer, in the most unscrupulous school the world
contained. But it was a school in which he learned lessons even more
dangerous than those of the camp. He not only mastered the Italian
language but drank in the manners and tone of the Italy around him, the
Italy of the Borgias and the Medici. It was with Italian versatility that
he turned from the camp to the counting-house; he was certainly engaged as
a commercial agent to one of the Venetian traders; tradition finds him as
a clerk at Antwerp; and in 1512 history at last encounters him as a
thriving wool merchant at Middelburg in Zealand.

[Sidenote: Cromwell and Wolsey]

Returning to England, Cromwell continued to amass wealth as years went on
by adding the trade of scrivener, something between that of a banker and
attorney, to his other occupations, as well as by advancing money to the
poorer nobles; and on the outbreak of the second war with France we find
him a busy and influential member of the Commons in Parliament. Five years
later, in 1528, the aim of his ambition