with Spartan-like courage, and died grandly." John Bale represents him as "a man of considerable learning, and the author of some interesting ballads, which seemed destined for the fire," as they likewise were destroyed.

The tradition of the times affirms that, although ungainly in person, Crumwell's manners were prepossessing, and that he could add to the value of a favour by the grace with which he conferred it.* Yet at the same moment he was utterly devoid of all sympathy. He could, without the slightest emotion, look upon a fellow-creature's agonies at the stake. He could stand upon the scaffold whilst the blood of some former friend streamed at his feet. And next, perhaps, go to inform the King "how the traitors died." Crumwell was the special representative of the King at the execution of Anne Boleyn and of Dr Forrest. The "roasting alive in chains," of Forrest is the most horrible case recorded of Henry's reign.

No

But to the sequel. For six weeks lay in a dungeon in the Tower the man who had left many a woman a widow, and many a child an orphan, awaiting his own unpitied doom. The hour of retribution had arrived. A vast multitude of people congregated to behold the Grand Inquisitor in the hands of the public executioner. one anticipated the horrors of the scene. Two unskilful headsmen are described as "chopping Lord Crumwell's neck and head for nearly half-an-hour;" the blood flowing profusely along the scaffold, whilst the ruffian mob danced and shouted in the frantic excitement of mingled joy and horror. An awful spectacle! Thomas Crumwell, who had attended

Archbishops of Canterbury, vol. vi. p. 123.

so many executions at the scaffold and at the stake, to witness the torture and insult heaped upon his victims, was thus terribly dismissed from life. A long roll of terrible deeds surrounds Crumwell's memory at all points, yet we are assured many times, by a recent biographer, that his "aim was noble."

When a special biography of Thomas Crumwell is undertaken by some honest and conscientious author, a fresh flood of light will be poured upon the transactions connected with the monastic visitations-the manner of men selected, the instructions they received, and the reports produced. Whoever that writer may be, he will find in the British Museum and the Record Office a large number of memoranda, notes, and letters in Crumwell's own handwriting, together with the secret correspondence between the Grand Inquisitor and his agents, which will fully establish the monstrous injustice perpetrated by this unprincipled Minister. Mr. Tytler, who examined some of the documents in question many years ago, remarked that they exhibit Crumwell as "equally tyrannical and unjust, despising the authority of the law, and unscrupulous in the use of torture." How much worse would have been the opinion of this honest and fearless historian had he perused all the proofs now at hand on this question ?*

* The Act of Attainder against Crumwell is not printed in the Statute-Book It is to be seen on the Parliament Roll of Henry's reign; and also in Burnet's Collectanea.

CHAPTER VI.

THE SOCIAL PICTURE CHANGED.

DEAN HOOK has the courage to state that Henry VIII. was not a bloodthirsty tyrant, and never contemplated with delight the misery of others." Let the reader peruse the following well-authenticated narrative, and then digest his wonder at the strange picture drawn by the Dean of Henry Tudor, all the traits of which are actually effaced by the pen of Dean Hook himself in his own work. Even Mr. Froude admits the pitiable condition of the people of England under the new order of things. The monks were the great cultivators of the soil of England-their lands the main element of food production. The cultivation of the land, which theretofore had employed and maintained, not in superfluity, but with all necessaries, the great bulk of the people, was suddenly suspended. Thousands, most likely millions, of acres which had been under the plough for successive centuries were all at once converted to pastures to meet the new and increasing demand for English wool. The extravagant habits of the landowning classes rendered them but too glad to welcome any change which would tend to relieve them from their pecuniary difficulties, and give them the means to procure fresh pleasures and to indulge in new fancies.

* Archbishops of Canterbury, vol. vii. p. 52.

So the

ploughs were banished from the farms, and with them the ploughmen and their families, and all who had passed their years in tilling the soil. What had been populous and thriving hamlets and villages, and busy towns, were, in a short time, converted into wastes.* The cottages were pulled down, and the churches turned into shelters for the sheep, which now roamed in vast flocks over what had been the once busy haunts of men. "Landlords were accused of practising more than Eastern tyranny, which compelled honest householders to become followers of less honest men's tables;" which brought honest matrons to the "needy rock and cards;" which compelled "men-children of good hope in the liberal sciences, and other honest qualities whereof the land had great lack," to labour at menial occupations that they might "sustain their parents' decrepit age and miserable poverty." Froward children, we are further assured, shook off the yoke of godly authority, and ran headlong into all kinds of wickedness, finally "garnishing gallowe trees;" modest and chaste virgins, lacking a dowry, were compelled to pass their days in servitude, or else "to marry to perpetual miserable poverty." . . Universal destruction seemed, it is added, to have befallen "this noble realm, by the outrageous and insatiable desire of the surveyor of lands."+

The King was so constantly employed in hanging, drawing, and quartering, often "for conscience-sake," occasionally varying the order by substituting parboiling and

* Sir Henry Spelman and his son have drawn sad pictures of the condition of the people of Norfolk and Suffolk under the new landowners.

+ An Informacion and Peticion agaynst the Oppressions of the Pore Commons of this Realme, 1543.

boiling as a change,* we need not wonder that thieves received little thought and less pity from those who were the arbiters of life and death. It must have been, to men less hardened than they who played so prominent a part in those scenes, a horrible and ghastly sight to behold, wherever they turned their eyes, the awful evidences of the brutal cruelty of the law. Along the river were suspended the bodies of men and women who had been accused of foul play to foreigners. Tower Hill must have been one ooze of mud, mingled and streaked with the blood of the victims who there yielded up their lives to the fury of a King whose thirst for gore could never be slaked. Tyburn, with its never-ending streams of victims, who escaped the axe at Tower Hill, or the fires of Smithfield, only to wind their slow and painful way from the various dungeons of London, there to be hanged, and the hanging to be followed by the revolting dismembering, that their yet quivering limbs, and heads with the features scarcely set in death, might garnish a city gate till they putrified and dropped, mingling with the mud and filth of the highway.† Persons ran through the streets of London crying out for food. They were seized and hanged from the "nearest tree."+

And how fared the social state at this juncture? Dicing'

See Chronicle of the Gray Friars, p. 35; also the Statute condemning poisoners to be boiled in oil, which statutes were carried out in ten cases. The Lamentacyon of a Christen agaynst ye Cytye of London, &c. 1542.

In the reign of Elizabeth, extraordinary powers were issued to the Lord Mayor, to hang from the nearest tree those clamorous rogues who demanded bread. The name of the official who carried out this order was that of "Provost Marshal." The record of the proceedings of his tribunal is still

extant.