among his friends, he was 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.

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ended in an open rupture with Rome, he had withdrawn silently from the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 remarriage 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
Catherine'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 by
a