vigilant to preserve your majesty from all treasons that few could be so secretly conceived but he detected the same in the beginning? If the noble princes of memory, King John, Henry II., and Richard II. had had such a counsellor about them, I suppose that they should never have been so traitorously abandoned and overthrown as those good pious princes were.... I loved him as my friend, for so I took him to be; but I chiefly loved him for the love which I thought I saw him bear ever towards your grace, singularly above all other. But now, if he be a traitor, I am sorry that ever I loved him or trusted him, and I am very glad that his treason is discovered in time. But yet again I am very sorrowful, for who shall your grace trust hereafter, if you might not trust him? Alas! I bewail and lament your grace's chance herein, I wot not whom your grace may trust. But I pray God continually night and day to send such a counsellor in his place whom your grace may trust, and who for all his qualities can and will serve your grace like to him, and that will have so much solicitude and care to preserve your grace from all dangers as I ever thought he had.'[337] Cranmer was doubtless a weak man; but assuredly it was a proof of some devotion to truth and justice, and of some boldness too, thus to plead the cause of the prisoner before a prince so absolute as Henry VIII., and even to express the wish that some efficient successor might be found. Lord Herbert of Cherbury thinks that Cranmer wrote to the king _boldly_; and this is also our opinion. The prince being intolerant of contradiction, this step of the archbishop was more than was needed to ruin him as well as Cromwell.