It is inevitable that there should be the widest divergence of opinion concerning every great figure in Reformation history, and it is idle to attempt to form an estimate of the character and work of Thomas Cromwell that will satisfy those who take different views of the great struggle during which his life was lived. But Catholics and Protestants must agree on the fundamental and permanent nature of the changes which he wrought: whether his work was good or bad, no one can deny his success in fulfilling his life’s aim as declared to Cavendish on the All Hallows Day when he rode forth to London ‘to make or to marre.’ He was the first chief minister that England had ever had, who was base-born and yet not a cleric. He stood completely outside the great religious movement of his time, and only made use of it to further his own political ends. He came at a time when things were in an unsettled state and ready for a change: his personality, emotionless, practical, stern, impressed itself on every phase of the national life. It was not alone in Parliament, Convocation, or Privy Council that he reigned supreme; on every department of the government service the stamp of his individual genius remains indelibly fixed. The permanence of his work was largely due to the way in which he clinched every reform which he introduced. He followed up the separation from Rome by attacking in turn the bishops, clergy, and friars, and by suppressing the monasteries. He obtained the support of the King in almost every measure which he invented, and then forced Parliament formally to legalize it. His action was in no case ineffective; the immediate result of it was almost always the attainment of the goal at which he aimed. To the student of the present day, however, who is enabled to survey the decade of Cromwell’s rule after a lapse of more than three and a half centuries, the immediate effects of his measures fade into the background and lose their importance, in the face of later and far greater developments. The latter were not always the results Cromwell wished to attain; in many cases they were ends which, if he could have foreseen, Cromwell would have been the last person to promote. They came years later, indirectly, as it were, and were rendered possible only by the lapse of time, the influence of other statesmen, and the growth and progress of civil and religious liberty, but none the less were they due to the impulse of Thomas Cromwell. By following out the effect of a few of the more important steps of his policy, it will not be difficult to see what some of these later developments were.