y
stone." The confessional had no secrets for Cromwell. Men's talk with
their closest friends found its way to his ear. "Words idly spoken," the
murmurs of a petulant abbot, the ravings of a moon-struck nun, were, as
the nobles cried passionately at his fall, "tortured into treason." The
only chance of safety lay in silence.

"Friends who used to write and send me presents," Erasmus tells us, "now
send neither letter nor gifts, nor receive any from anyone, and this
through fear." But even the refuge of silence was closed by a law more
infamous than any that has ever blotted the statute-book of England. Not
only was thought made treason, but men were forced to reveal their
thoughts on pain of their very silence being punished with the penalties
of treason. All trust in the older bulwarks of liberty was destroyed by
a policy as daring as it was unscrupulous. The noblest institutions were
degraded into instruments of terror. Though Wolsey had strained the law
to the utmost, he had made no open attack on the freedom of justice. If
he shrank from assembling parliaments, it was from his sense that they
were the bulwarks of liberty.

But under Cromwell the coercion of juries and the management of judges
rendered the courts mere mouth-pieces of the royal will; and where even
this shadow of justice proved an obstacle to bloodshed, parliament was
brought into play to pass bill after bill of attainder. "He shall be
judged by the bloody laws he has himself made," was the cry of the
council at the moment of his fall, and by a singular retribution the
crowning injustice which he sought to introduce even into the practice
of attainder, the condemnation of a man without hearing his defence, was
only practised on himself.

But, ruthless as was the "Terror" of Cromwell, it was of a nobler type
than the Terror of France. He never struck uselessly or capriciously, or
stooped to the meaner victims of the guillotine. His blows were
effective just because he chose his victims from among the noblest and
the best. If he struck at the Church, it was through the Carthusians,
the holiest and the most renowned of English churchmen. If he struck at
the baronage, it was through Lady Salisbury, in whose veins flowed the
blood of kings. If he struck at the New Learning, it was through the
murder of Sir Thomas More. But no personal vindictiveness mingled with
his crime.

In temper, indeed, so far as we can judge from the few stories which
lingered