Six weeks elapsed before the abbot's fate was decided, part or the whole of which time he was in London. At the beginning of November he was sent back into Somersetshire, already condemned at a tribunal where Cromwell sat as prosecutor, jury, and judge. His escape in a more regular court was not contemplated as a possibility; among loose papers of Cromwell still remaining there is a memorandum in his own hand for "the trial and execution" of the Abbot of Glastonbury.[507] But the appearance of unfair dealing was greater than the reality. Lord Russell, whose stainless character was worthy of his name, was one of the commissioners before whom the trial was conducted; and Russell has left on record his approval of, and acquiescence in the conduct of the case, in plain and unmistakeable language. Whiting was arraigned at Wells on Thursday, the 14th of November, with his treasurers, "before as worshipful a jury as was charged there for many years."[508] The crime of which he was formally accused was robbing the abbey church; and there was no doubt that he was guilty of having committed that crime, to whatever the guilt may have amounted. But if the government had prosecuted in every instance of abbey-church robbery, a monk would have hung in chains at all the cross-roads in England. The Abbot of Glastonbury was tried and convicted of felony; his real offence was treason, as the word was interpreted by Cromwell. He was unpopular in the county, and among his dependents. "There were many bills," Lord Russell said, "put up against the abbot, by his tenants and others, for wrongs and injuries that he had done them."[509] He was sentenced to death, and the day following was fixed for the execution. He was taken with the two monks from Wells to Glastonbury; he was drawn through the town in the usual manner, and thence to the top of the conical hill which rises out of the level plain of Somersetshire, called Glastonbury Torre. To the last he was tormented with questions, "but he would accuse no man but himself;" he only requested the visitors' servants who were present on the Torre to entreat their masters and Lord Russell "to desire the King's Highness of his merciful goodness and in the way of charity to forgive him his great offences by him committed and done against his Grace."[510] The modern student, to whom the passions and the difficulties of the time are as a long forgotten dream, who sees only the bleak hill-top on the dreary November day, the gallows, and an infirm old man guilty of nothing which he can understand to be a crime, shudders at the needless cruelty. Cromwell, for his share in this policy of death, was soon to receive as he had given; a few more months, and he too on Tower Hill would pass to his account. CHAPTER XVII. ANNE OF CLEVES, AND THE FALL OF CROMWELL. [Sidenote: Increasing impatience of the country for the king's marriage.]