But while More's passion was one that any man might envy, his courage was shared by humbler martyrs. In the same year in which he was beheaded thirteen Dutch Anabaptists were burnt, as he would have approved, by the English government. Mute, inglorious Christs, they were led like sheep to the slaughter and as lambs dumb before their shearers. They had no eloquence, no high position, to make their words ring from side to side of Europe and echo down the centuries; but their meek endurance should not go unremembered. To take More's place as chief minister Henry appointed the most obsequious tool he could find, Thomas Cromwell. [Sidenote: Thomas Cromwell, 1485?-1540] To good purpose this man had studied Machiavelli's _Prince_ as a practical manual of tyranny. His most important service to the crown was the {296} next step in the reduction of the medieval church, the dissolution of the monasteries. [Sidenote: Dissolution of the monasteries] Like other acts tending towards the Reformation this was, on the whole, popular, and had been rehearsed on a small scale on several previous occasions in English history. The pope and the king of France taught Edward II to dissolve the preceptories, to the number of twenty-three, belonging to the Templars; in 1410 the Commons petitioned for the confiscation of all church property; in 1414 the alien priories in England fell under the animadversion of the government; their property was handed over to the crown and they escaped only by the payment of heavy fines, by incorporation into English orders, and by partial confiscation of their land. The idea prevailed that mortmain had failed of its object and that therefore the church might rightfully be relieved of her ill-gotten gains. These were grossly exaggerated, a pamphleteer believing that the wealth of the church amounted to half the property of the realm. In reality the total revenue of the spirituality amounted to only L320,000; that of the monasteries to only L140,000. There had been few endowments in the fifteenth century; only eight new ones, in fact, in the whole period 1399-1509. Colleges, schools, and hospitals now attracted the money that had previously gone to the monks. Moreover, the monastic life had fallen on evil days. The abbeys no longer were centers of learning and of the manufacture of books. The functions of hospitality and of charity that they still exercised were not sufficient to redeem them in the eyes of the people for the "gross, carnal, and vicious living" with which they were commonly and quite rightly charged. Visitations undertaken not by hostile governments but by bishops in the fifteenth century prove that much immorality obtained within the cloister walls. By 1528 {297} they had become so intolerable that a popular pamphleteer, Simon Fish, in his _Supplication of Beggars_, proposed that the mendicant friars be entirely suppressed. [Sidenote: January 21, 1535]