Tr. 287) was due simply to the fact that they were among the remnants of the old nobility, whom it was Wolsey's policy to exterminate. Buckingham was condemned upon the testi mony of discharged servants, who had been kept in confinement, with death and the rack staring them in the face. At last in the course of retribution Wolsey himself fell. He might truly say that had he served God as diligently as he had served the king he would not have been given over in his gray hairs. Although Wolsey was far surpassed in iniquity by some of his successors in power, he received, as he confessed, his "just re ward." Anne Bolevn was murdered by a tribunal presided over by her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk; and Henry VIII., under the lead of Thomas Cromwell, started out, under the guise of reformation in religion, on his career of lust, confiscation and murder. The martyrdom of More, Fisher and the monks of the Charter House (i St. Tr. 385) would alone suffice to bury the reign in in famy. The real crime of Sir Thomas More and of Bishop Fisher was that their rectitude smote the conscience of the king and his guilty paramour. Alore was guilty of no seditious act, nor disloyal word. He and Fisher had been sent to the Tower for trea son in not taking the oath as to the Act of Succession. More was willing to swear loyalty to the successors of Queen Anne, but refused to subscribe to the part of the act which declared Henry's subsequent marriage valid. Cromwell and several privy coun cillors examined More in prison, and tried in vain to induce him either to own the king's supremacy in direct terms or to deny it. Then the venal and lying solicitor-general, Rich, sought to trap him in private. The indict ment charged him with refusing to answer directly whether he would accept the king as head of the church; with having written Fisher that "the act of Parliament was like a sword with two edges; if a man answered
one way it would confound his soul, and if the other way, it would confound his body," and with having spoken treasonable words to Rich. On his trial the aged chancellor ad mitted that he had disliked the king's second marriage, and had told the king so when asked for his opinion. If it was an offense, he said, to answer the king truly, he had already been punished enough, for he had been fifteen months in prison and had lost all his estates. He asserted that he had done nothing against the act of Parliament; in deed, to avoid offense he had refused to say anything about it. Laws cannot punish for silence, he claimed; only for words or deeds. God alone could judge the secrets of the heart. In answer to the lying perversions of Rich, he replied in his dignified and impres sive way: "If I were a man, my lords, that had no regard to my oath, I had no occasion to be here at this time (as is well known to everybody) as a criminal; and if this oath, Mr. Rich, which you have taken, be true, then I pray I may never see God's face, which, were it otherwise, is an imprecation I would not be guilty of to gain the whole world." But the noble old man's virtues condemned him. Bishop Fisher, who was dying in the Tower with age and sickness, was trapped by Rich into a technical admission of guilt in saying that the king neither was nor could be supreme head of the church. The Abbots who refused to surrender ta the royal exactions and confiscations were exterminated in a manner thus described in Cromwell's notebook: "Item—The Abbot of Reading to be sent down to be tried and exe cuted at Reading with his accomplices- Item —The Abbot of Glaston to be tried at Glaston and also to be executed there, with his accomplices. Item—To see that the evidence be well sorted and the indictments well drawn against the said Abbots and their accomplices. Item—To send Gendon to the Tower to be racked."
