2. =The Acts of Treason and Supremacy. 1534.=--In =1534= Parliament also passed a new Act of Treasons which made it high treason to wish or practise harm to the king, the queen, and their heirs, to use words denying their titles, or to call the king a 'heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or usurper of the crown.' Later in the same year, but in a fresh session, Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, which confirmed the title of Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England, a title very similar to that to which the king had obtained the qualified assent of the clergy in =1531= (see p. 386). From that time anyone who denied the king to be the Supreme Head of the Church of England was liable to a traitor's death. [Illustration: John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, 1504-1535; from a drawing by Holbein in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle.] 3. =The Monks of the Charterhouse. 1534.=--It can hardly be doubted that Henry's chief adviser in these tyrannical measures was the able and unscrupulous Cromwell. It was Cromwell's plan to exalt the royal authority into a despotism by means of a subservient Parliament. He was already Henry's secretary; and in =1535= was appointed the king's Vicar-General in ecclesiastical matters. He was quite ready to push the Acts of Parliament which had recently been passed to their extreme consequences. His first object was to get rid of the Friars Observant, who had shown themselves most hostile to what they called in plainness of speech the king's adultery. All their houses were suppressed, and some of the inmates put to death. Then Cromwell fell on the London Charterhouse,[3] the inmates of which had been imprisoned in the year before simply for a refusal to take the oath of the Act of Succession, though they had not uttered a word against the king's proceedings. They could now be put to death under the new Treason Act, for denying the king's supremacy, and many of them were accordingly executed after the usual barbarous fashion, whilst others perished of starvation or of diseases contracted in the filthy prisons in which they were confined. "I profess," said the Prior, Houghton, "that it is not out of obstinate malice or a mind of rebellion that I do disobey the king, but only for the fear of God, that I offend not the Supreme Majesty; because our Holy Mother the Church hath decreed and appointed otherwise than the king and Parliament hath ordained." Houghton and his fellows were as truly martyrs as Frith had been. They at least had sown no seeds of rebellion, and they died because a tyrannical king insisted on ruling over consciences as well as over bodily acts. [Footnote 3: The Charterhouse here means the house of the Carthusians.]