[470] Philip Melancthon to Henry VIII., Foxe, Vol. V.
[471] Foxe, Vol. V. p. 265.
[472] Hall’s Chronicle, p. 828. Hall is a good evidence on this point. He was then a middle-aged man, resident in London, with clear eyes and a shrewd, clear head, and was relating not what others told him, but what he actually saw.
[473] In Latimer’s case, against Henry’s will, or without his knowledge. Cromwell, either himself deceived or desiring to smooth the storm, told Latimer that the king advised his resignation; “which his Majesty afterwards denied, and pitied his condition.”—State Papers, Vol. I. p. 849.
[474] Hall.
[475] Notes of Erroneous Doctrines preached at Paul’s Cross by the Vicar of Stepney: MS. Rolls House.
[476] Henry Dowes to Cromwell: Ellis, third series, Vol. III. p. 258.
[477] Richard Cromwell to Lord Cromwell: MS. State Paper Office, second series, Vol. VII. p. 188.
[478] More’s Utopia, Burnet’s translation, p. 13.
[479] Respectable authorities, as most of my readers are doubtless aware, inform us that seventy-two thousand criminals were executed in England in the reign of Henry VIII. Historians who are accustomed to examine their materials critically, have usually learnt that no statements must be received with so much caution as those which relate to numbers. Grotius gives, in a parallel instance, the number of heretics executed under Charles V. in the Netherlands as a hundred thousand. The Prince of Orange gives them as fifty thousand. The authorities are admirable, though sufficiently inconsistent, while the judicious Mr. Prescott declares both estimates alike immeasurably beyond the truth. The entire number of victims destroyed by Alva in the same provinces by the stake, by the gallows, and by wholesale massacre, amount, when counted carefully in detail, to twenty thousand only. The persecutions under Charles, in a serious form, were confined to the closing years of his reign. Can we believe that wholesale butcheries were passed by comparatively unnoticed by any one at the time of their perpetration, more than doubling the atrocities which startled subsequently the whole world? Laxity of assertion in matters of number is so habitual as to have lost the character of falsehood. Men not remarkably inaccurate will speak of thousands, and, when cross-questioned, will rapidly reduce them to hundreds, while a single cipher inserted by a printer’s mistake becomes at once a tenfold exaggeration. Popular impressions on the character of the reign of Henry VIII. have, however, prevented inquiry into any statement which reflects discredit upon this; the enormity of an accusation has passed for an evidence of its truth. Notwithstanding that until the few last years of the king’s life no felon who could read was within the grasp of the law, notwithstanding that sanctuaries ceased finally to protect murderers six years only before his death, and that felons of a lighter cast might use their shelter to the last,—even those considerable facts have created no misgiving, and learned and ignorant historians alike have repeated the story of the 72,000 with equal confidence.