s a generous, kindly-hearted man, with pleasant and
winning manners which atoned for a certain awkwardness of person, and with
a constancy of friendship which won him a host of devoted adherents. But
no touch either of love or hate swayed him from his course. The student of
Machiavelli had not studied the "Prince" in vain. He had reduced bloodshed
to a system. Fragments of his papers still show us with what a
business-like brevity he ticked off human lives among the casual
"remembrances" of the day. "Item, the Abbot of Reading to be sent down to
be tried and executed at Reading." "Item, to know the King's pleasure
touching Master More." "Item, when Master Fisher shall go to his
execution, and the other." It is indeed this utter absence of all passion,
of all personal feeling, that makes the figure of Cromwell the most
terrible in our history. He has an absolute faith in the end he is
pursuing, and he simply hews his way to it as a woodman hews his way
through the forest, axe in hand.

[Sidenote: Cromwell and More]

The choice of his first victim showed the ruthless precision with which
Cromwell was to strike. In the general opinion of Europe the foremost
Englishman of the time was Sir Thomas More. As the policy of the divorce
ended in an open rupture with Rome he had withdrawn silently from the
ministry, but his silent disapproval of the new policy was more telling
than the opposition of obscurer foes. To Cromwell there must have been
something specially galling in More's attitude of reserve. The religious
reforms of the New Learning were being rapidly carried out, but it was
plain that the man who represented the very life of the New Learning
believed that the sacrifice of liberty and justice was too dear a price to
pay even for religious reform. In the actual changes which the divorce
brought about there was nothing to move More to active or open opposition.
Though he looked on the divorce and re-marriage as without religious
warrant, he found no difficulty in accepting an Act of Succession passed
in 1534 which declared the marriage of Anne Boleyn valid, annulled the
title of Catharine's child, Mary, and declared the children of Anne the
only lawful heirs to the crown. His faith in the power of Parliament over
all civil matters was too complete to admit a doubt of its competence to
regulate the succession to the throne. But by the same Act an oath
recognizing the succession as then arranged was ordered to be taken b