In the meantime the new Act of Succession had been passed in Parliament, and the oath of allegiance which it required was promptly tendered to More and Fisher, who finally consented to swear to the statute itself but not the preamble[246]. They were unwilling to give their reasons for rejecting the latter, but Cranmer cannot have been far wrong when he wrote to Cromwell that the cause of their refusal to accept it lay in its attacks on the authority of the Pope and the validity of the King’s first marriage[247]. The Archbishop, ever on the side of humanity, urged the King’s minister to accept the compromise which More and Fisher offered, but in vain. The ex-Chancellor and the aged bishop were committed to the Tower, which they never quitted again. For more than a year they remained there subjected to every sort of indignity, until on May 5, 1535, they were summoned by the King, and told that unless they swore to the Act of Succession and the Royal Supremacy, they would be treated no better than the Carthusian monks who had lately been executed[248]. They were allowed six weeks for reflection, but they replied that they would not change their opinion in six hundred years, if they lived so long. So strong was the popular feeling however, that it is doubtful if Henry would have dared to execute Fisher, simply because he said that ‘the King, our sovereign Lord, is not Supreme Head of the Church of England’; but when it was announced that the Pope, at a consistory held May 20, had created him a Cardinal, the King was so enraged that he threw all caution to the winds. He declared in his fury that ‘he would give Fisher another hat, and send his head to Rome for the Cardinal’s hat afterwards,’ and ordered both his prisoners to swear to his ecclesiastical headship before St. John’s Day, or suffer punishment as traitors[249]. Cromwell had endeavoured from the beginning to keep up the appearance of being reluctant to punish the aged bishop and his noble companion, and there is record that when he heard of the latter’s first refusal to abandon his beliefs, ‘he sware a great oath[250].’ But in spite of this there is every reason to think that he was the true cause of the ex-Chancellor’s death. It is not likely that Henry would have consented to the execution of a man whom he had formerly loved and respected as much as More, unless his counsellor had poisoned his heart against him. Moreover, the mentions of More and Fisher in Cromwell’s ‘remembrances’ are so frequent and of such a character, as to leave little doubt that he had determined to ruin them from the first. They both suffered death by beheading in the summer of 1535[251]. It was a terrible evidence of the ruthlessness of the forward policy to which Henry had now committed himself by the advice of his new minister. The most brilliant and cultivated Englishman of the time had been brought to the block to bear testimony to the King’s relentless