head an amount of detail of a comparatively unimportant nature, which would have been quite impossible for a man like his predecessor. The Cardinal, absorbed in studying the great diplomatic combinations of continental Europe, had shamefully neglected minor affairs at home. Cromwell, in his ten years of power, not only atoned for the errors of Wolsey, but also familiarized himself with every detail of domestic administration to an extent that no King or minister had ever done in England before. It would have been almost impossible to carry through the tremendous changes which had followed the divorce, without the aid of a counsellor of the peculiar talents of Thomas Cromwell. The thread of our narrative now becomes so complicated, when the new minister is at last fully installed in the King’s service, that it will be necessary to depart from the chronological order of events hitherto followed, and to treat separately each phase of Cromwell’s policy, up to the reaction of 1539. The Internal and Foreign Administration, Suppression of the Monasteries, of the Pilgrimage of Grace, &c., all move on hand in hand, and in order to understand their bearing on one another, it is only needful to remember that they were all the work of one man, and were proceeding in general at the same time. APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VI THE SUPPLICATION OF THE COMMONS AGAINST THE ORDINARIES. Four drafts of this petition exist to-day in the Public Record Office. One of them is written in a hand which may be recognized in the greater part of Cromwell’s correspondence of the time, and which is probably that of his chief clerk; it is corrected and revised by Cromwell himself. Of the other three, one, which is uncorrected and probably a final draft, is also written by the clerk--and the other two, chiefly in a strange handwriting, are filled with interlineations by Cromwell. The following copy was made from the first of these drafts (Cal. v, 1016 (4)). The words in brackets are crossed out in the original manuscript: the words in italics are inserted between the lines. All the corrections are in Cromwell’s hand. ‘To the King our Sovereigne Lorde