=HENRY'S PALTRY EXCUSES.=
Henry VIII., more calm than the pope, having heard of his discontent, feared to push him to extremities; and Cromwell, a month after the date of the bull, instructed Da Casale to justify the king to the Vatican. 'Fisher and More,' he was to say, 'had on all points of the internal policy of England come to conclusions diametrically opposed to the quiet and prosperity of the kingdom. They had held secret conversations with certain men notorious for their audacity, and had poured into the hearts of these wretches the poison which they had first prepared in their own.[159] Could we permit their crime, spreading wider and wider, to give a death-blow to the State? Fisher and More alone opposed laws which had been accepted by the general consent of the people, and were necessary to the prosperity of the kingdom. Our mildest of sovereigns could not longer tolerate an offence so atrocious.'[160]
Even these excuses accuse and condemn Henry. Neither More nor Fisher had entered into a plot against the State; their resistance had been purely religious; they were free to act according to their consciences. It might have been necessary to take some prudential measures in an age as yet little fitted for liberty; but nothing could excuse the scaffold, erected by the king's orders, for men who were regarded with universal respect.
[124] 'Qua de re tota urbe sermo fuit.'—State Papers, vii. p. 604.
[125] 'Nunquam alias gravius erratum fuisse.'—Ibid.
[126] 'Eo maturius truncatur capite.'—Erasmi Epp. i. p. 1543.
[127] Interrogatories.—State Papers, i. p. 432.
[128] More's Life, p. 271.
[129] Fuller, p. 203.
[130] John xvii. 3. The Testament was in Latin.