From the day of his arrest, his execution had been a foregone conclusion; there was no chance of ultimate salvation for the fallen minister. But as a drowning man clutches at a straw to save himself from death, so Cromwell, at Henry’s request, wrote a letter, which he must have known would be useless, to say what he could on his own behalf[718]. The letter speaks for itself: its denials of the charges are not as frequent as the acknowledgements of guilt and pleas for mercy, but it produced no effect on the angry King. What the injudicious words spoken before Throgmorton and Riche were, it is impossible to tell; they were probably simply sentences into which a treasonable intent was read, as into those mentioned in the attainder; the ‘secrete matier’ which Cromwell was accused of revealing without leave may well have been a project of Henry’s to get rid of Anne, which for many reasons it was expedient for him to keep secret, until he was certain that he could free himself by one blow from the marriage which by this time had become intolerable to him. To this purpose all the King’s energies were now bent, and conscious that his fallen minister had known more of his relations with Anne than any other, he sent him in the end of June a list of questions on the subject, couched in such judicious language, that if Cromwell gave the replies he confidently looked for, they would supply cogent reasons for his divorce[719]. He was sure, he said, that now that Cromwell was condemned to die, he would tell the truth and not damn his soul also, by bearing false witness at the last[720]. Whether Henry’s assumption here was correct or not, it is impossible to tell. Cromwell knew of course that his chance of pardon was almost nothing, but he was not so foolish as to throw it away absolutely; he also knew that the King’s heart’s desire was a divorce from Anne, and he saw that his only hope lay in aiding Henry to his utmost to free himself from her. Nor was Cromwell the sort of man to whom dying with a lie on his lips would mean very much; his whole interest was absorbed in the endeavour to make the most of the one very faint chance of escape that was offered to him. Hence it is possible that the testimony he bore in this case may not have been strictly true. He appears to have written two letters in answer to the King’s interrogatories; one of them is in the library of the Marquis of Salisbury at Hatfield House; the other, badly mutilated, in the British Museum[721]. Both of them are filled with abject pleas for mercy, and one of them, which was carried to the King by Cromwell’s faithful Ralph Sadler, moved Henry so much, that it is said that he commanded it to be read to him thrice[722]. The two letters tell the same story in slightly different words: they give a full account of everything that Cromwell had seen of Henry’s relation to Anne, since they first met at Rochester. They dilate on the King’s disgust at the first sight of the ‘great