of the seid Citizens and Inhabytaunt_es_ by the grace of the blyssyd Trynyte Who p_re_s_er_ue you...[262].’ Such was the calm way in which parliamentary suffrage rights were made of no effect and the King’s pleasure enforced. It is important to notice in this connexion how careful Henry and Cromwell were to cloak their most unwarrantable proceedings by the preservation of ostensible constitutionalism. Never was the now farcical form of a fair election abandoned; never did the King fail outwardly to observe those legal restrictions by which the Crown was supposedly fettered, and the liberties of the nation theoretically preserved. The autocracy which Cromwell had done so much to establish was carried on ‘within and upon the already existing constitution,’ and the public protest was thus in great measure disarmed. It is no wonder that the invaluable services which Cromwell rendered to the Crown were rewarded by an almost exclusive enjoyment of the royal confidence, which enabled him soon to do almost what he pleased with his two great rivals, Norfolk and Gardiner. At first he had cautiously held himself aloof from these men, but now that he had outstripped them in the King’s favour, his bearing towards them altered accordingly. It is a very significant fact that in his ten years of service, he never left the King for any considerable length of time, but often contrived to get Norfolk and Gardiner sent away--the one to cope with internal troubles, the other to act as ambassador to France. Cromwell succeeded in harassing them both while they were at Court, and in making them abandon every pretence to consistency. Chapuys, in a letter of December 9, 1533, tells us that Norfolk, hitherto the most pronounced of Catholics, uttered ‘a thousand blasphemies’ against the Pope, even more shocking than those of the King, calling him ‘an unhappy whoreson, a liar, and a wicked man; and that it should cost him (Norfolk) wife and children ... and all that he possessed, or that he would be revenged on him. He has a good deal changed his tune, for it was he ... who favoured most the authority of the Pope; but he must act in this way not to lose his remaining influence, which apparently does not extend much further than Cromwell wishes; for which reason, I understand, he is wonderfully sick of the Court[263].’ In the spring of 1535 the Duke was forced to surrender entirely, and retire to his estate at Kenninghall. Gardiner had to abandon the Secretaryship in 1534 in Cromwell’s favour. The new minister tantalized him in much the same way as he did Norfolk, and doubtless increased the enmity of the Bishop of Winchester, which he had first incurred at the time of Wolsey’s fall, and which five years later was to be such an important factor in effecting his own destruction.