Aware of Henry’s character, More yet had no choice but to accept the lord chancellorship from the king on Wolsey’s fall in 1529. It was no matter for personal satisfaction, and More’s reply to the Duke of Norfolk was substantially the same as his previous answer to Roper: “Considering how wise and honourable a prelate had lately before taken so great a fall, he had no cause to rejoice in his new dignity.” Erasmus wrote, “I do not at all congratulate More, nor literature; but I do indeed congratulate England, for a better or holier judge could not have been appointed.” On November 3rd, 1529, Sir Thomas More, as chancellor, opened parliament, and in a long speech declared that “the cause of its assembly was to reform such things as had been used or permitted by inadvertence, or by changes of time had become inexpedient.” It was the opening of the seven years’ parliament, and before six years should run, this same parliament would, at the king’s order, condemn Sir Thomas More by act of attainder. The position of the new chancellor was dangerous from the first. Wolsey had fallen because he had failed to help Henry to a divorce from his queen, Catherine of Aragon, and More had been made his successor because the king had counted on him to accomplish the “great matter.” All that Sir Thomas could hope for was that he might be allowed to do his work as chancellor without being mixed up with divorce proceedings. As long as he was not called upon to declare publicly that the divorce was right, he had no wish to interfere in the matter. First to last no word of approval came from More’s lips to encourage Henry in the divorce, but he was not the man to express judgment on a case that he did not wish brought before him.[87] In the end the chancellor’s very silence turned Henry’s disappointment to active displeasure, and More’s life was taken in savage revenge for non-compliance with the royal will. Henry’s divorce dates the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in England--of that ecclesiastical revolution in which the supremacy of Rome was rejected, the crown superseded the pope as supreme head of the Church of England, and England was detached from the rest of Roman Catholic Christendom. In the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth the revolution proceeded still further, and Catholic rites and doctrines, service books and ceremonies were rigorously cast out of the Church of England, and all who adhered to the old order in religion were punished by law. But those days were far off as yet. More, at the outset of this revolution, declines to follow the king in the rejection of the old allegiance to Rome. All he asks for is freedom of conscience to remain in the faith of his fathers, to worship as Christians in England had worshipped since the coming of Augustine. To escape death by giving up this freedom is impossible for Sir Thomas More.