Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/76

murder, not merely among men entangled in the habits of a darker age, but among those who had struggled to emancipate their minds from tradition, and who made it the pride and the business of their lives to resist the vices of the vulgar. It was no reason for an assassin to escape the gallows that Melanchthon had prayed for a brave man to despatch Henry VIII.; that the brave man who despatched the Duke of Guise was praised by Beza to the skies ; that Knox wished the doom of Rizzio to be inflicted on every Catholic ; that the Swedish bishops recommended that a dose of poison should be mixed with the King's food. Nor can we admit that the intolerance of Wolsey is excused by comparison with the greater intolerance of More. The Cardinal, in his last hours, asked for measures of repression, the nature of which his own example and the statute of Henry IV. left in no kind of doubt. Sir Thomas More protested before his death, in terms which have satisfied the impartial judgment of one of his latest successors on the woolsack, that no Protestant had perished by his act.