a larger, wiser
policy in the impenetrable mind of the subtle minister. As
secretary of state he drove England at his own pace through
the vast religious changes of the period. For the ruin he
brought upon Catholicism, and more especially for his
destruction of the thousand monasteries that dotted England,
he has been called the "hammer of the monks." Of even lower
birth than Wolsey, and rising to almost equal power,
Cromwell began life as a son of a blacksmith.

He wandered over Europe and especially Italy as a soldier,
merchant, and general adventurer of the lower and wilder
type. He became Wolsey's right-hand man, and held loyally by
his chief even after the latter's overthrow.

It had been Henry's passion for Anne Boleyn, and the
resulting necessity for divorce from his wife Catherine,
that caused Wolsey's fall. On the same passion did Cromwell
build his rise. He secretly urged the King to break with
Rome entirely and declare himself sole head of the English
Church. Thus he could divorce himself. Henry first tried a
last negotiation with the Pope; that failing, he turned to
his new adviser.

Cromwell was again ready with his suggestion that the King should
disavow the papal jurisdiction, declare himself head of the Church
within its realm, and obtain a divorce from his own ecclesiastical
courts. But the new minister looked on the divorce as simply the prelude
to a series of changes which he was bent upon accomplishing. In all his
checkered life, that had left its deepest stamp on him in Italy. Not
only in the rapidity and ruthlessness of his designs, but in their
larger scope, their admirable combination, the Italian statecraft
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
his 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 not, 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 Machiave