at issues such
a conception of a statesman's duty might lead was now to be seen in the
career of a greater than Wolsey. The two dukes had struck down the
Cardinal only to set up another master in his room. Since his interview
with Henry Cromwell had remained in the king's service, where his steady
advance in the royal favour was marked by his elevation to the post of
Secretary of State. His patience was at last rewarded by the failure of
the policy for which his own had been set aside. At the close of 1530 the
college of cardinals formally rejected the king's request for leave to
decide the whole matter in his own spiritual courts; and the defeat of
Norfolk's project drove Henry nearer and nearer to the bold plan from
which he had shrunk at Wolsey's fall. Cromwell was again ready with his
suggestion that the king should disavow the Papal jurisdiction, declare
himself Head of the Church within his realm, and obtain a divorce from his
own Ecclesiastical Courts. But he looked on the divorce as simply the
prelude to a series of changes which the new minister was bent upon
accomplishing. In all his chequered life what had left its deepest stamp
on him was Italy. Not only in the rapidity and ruthlessness of his
designs, but in their larger scope, their clearer purpose, and their
admirable combination, the Italian state-craft entered with Cromwell into
English politics. He is in fact the first English minister in whom we can
trace through the whole period of his rule the steady working out of a
great and definite aim, that of raising the king to absolute authority on
the ruins of every rival power within the realm. It was not that Cromwell
was a mere slave of tyranny. Whether we may trust the tale that carries
him in his youth to Florence or no, his statesmanship was closely modelled
on the ideal of the Florentine thinker whose book was constantly in his
hand. Even as a servant of Wolsey he startled the future Cardinal,
Reginald Pole, by bidding him take for his manual in politics the "Prince"
of Machiavelli. Machiavelli hoped to find in Caesar Borgia or in the later
Lorenzo de' Medici a tyrant who after crushing all rival tyrannies might
unite and regenerate Italy; and terrible and ruthless as his policy was,
the final aim of Cromwell seems to have been that of Machiavelli, an aim
of securing enlightenment and order for England by the concentration of
all authority in the crown.

[Sidenote: The Headship of the Church]

The