If feeble minds did not shrink from bending beneath the royal despotism, men of fanatical mould cherished vengeance in their hearts. Great wounds had been inflicted on the papacy, and they burnt to strike some signal blow against the cause of Reform. That also, they said, must have its victim. For all these monasteries sacrificed, one person must be immolated: one only, but taken from the most illustrious station. The king having, on the one side, struck his tutor and his friend, must now, to maintain the balance, strike his wife on the other. A tragedy was about to begin which would terminate in a frightful catastrophe. Anne Boleyn had not been brought up, as some have said, 'in the worst school in Europe,'[263] but in one of the best—in the household of the pious Margaret of Angoulême, who was the enlightened protectress not only of the learned, but of all friends of the Gospel. Anne had learnt from that princess to love the Reformation and the Reformers. And accordingly she was in the eyes of the papal partisans, the principal cause of the change that had been wrought in the king's mind, and by him throughout the kingdom. The Reformation, as we have seen, began in England about 1517 with the reading of the Holy Scriptures in the universities; but the most accredited Roman doctors have preferred assigning it another origin, and, speaking of Cranmer's connexion with Anne Boleyn, thirteen years later, have said, 'Such is the beginning of the Reformation in England.'[264] In this assertion there is an error both of chronology and history. [Sidenote: CRANMER'S ELOQUENCE.]