[Born about 1498, executed 1540. Cromwell began his public career as secretary of Cardinal Wolsey, and made a brilliant reputation for administrative ability before his patron’s fall. He acquired the notice of Henry VIII by his loyalty to the disgraced cardinal when all other friends had deserted him. By the king’s favor he received the highest offices of the state, and was made Prime Minister, finally becoming earl of Essex. Cromwell was the political leader of the English Reformation, and the most effective instrument in concentrating power in the hands of the king. His impeachment and execution for high treason, however he may have deserved his fate for his cruelty and unscrupulousness, was gross ingratitude on the part of Henry.] The debate on the suppression of the monasteries was the first instance of opposition with which Cromwell had met, and for some time longer it was to remain the only one. While the great revolution which struck down the Church was in progress, England looked silently on. In all the earlier ecclesiastical changes, in the contest over the Papal jurisdiction and Papal exactions, in the reform of the Church courts, even in the curtailment of the legislative independence of the clergy, the nation as a whole had gone with the king. But from the enslavement of the clergy, from the gagging of the pulpits, from the suppression of the monasteries, the bulk of the nation stood aloof. It is only through the stray depositions of royal spies that we catch a glimpse of the wrath and hate which lay seething under this silence of a whole people. For the silence was a silence of terror. Before Cromwell’s rise and after his fall from power the reign of Henry VIII witnessed no more than the common tyranny and bloodshed of the time. But the years of Cromwell’s administration form the one period in our history which deserves the name which men have given to the rule of Robespierre. It was the English Terror. It was by terror that Cromwell mastered the king. Cranmer could plead for him at a later time with Henry as “one whose surety was only by your majesty, who loved your majesty, as I ever thought, no less than God.”