Wolsey had died in disgrace, on the 27th November 1530, and the chancellorship devolved on his own secretary, Thomas Cromwell, a man who virtually made the history of the next ten years in England. The son of a “fuller of clothes” or dyer, his career had been singularly varied. He had as a mere youth found his way to Italy, where he served as a common soldier, but being preternaturally observant, he succeeded in picking up many scraps of the new learning which fell from the great Medici banquet, then being spread throughout Tuscany. Machiavelli’s book, _Il Principe_, was the foundation on which his whole future statesmanship was built. On his return to England he was successively a scrivener, a lawyer, a money-lender, and a great wool merchant at Middlesbrough. It was not till he was nearly middle-aged, that he attracted the notice of Wolsey, then beginning the suppression of some small monasteries, in favour of his colleges at Ipswich and Oxford. On Wolsey’s fall, it was thought that he would be imprisoned, but he seized the moment when the tide was turning, and used it to float himself into a safe harbour. Reginald Pole, son of the Countess of Salisbury, had met him at Cardinal Wolsey’s, and had recognised in him the coming man. They had talked philosophy, and Cromwell tried to persuade him that Plato’s system was “a dream,” promising to send him a copy of _Il Principe_. It was probably at Cromwell’s instigation that Henry offered Pole the Archbishopric of York, although he was not yet in priest’s orders. Seeing the course that the King was now taking, and Cromwell’s growing influence, instead of accepting the benefice, Pole determined to fly the kingdom, “beyond the reach of his bow,”[90] and was in consequence saved from the fate of More and Fisher, and, later on, from that of his own mother. Henry, loth to lose so able an advocate as he would prove, if he could be won over to his cause, refused his repeated request to be allowed to go and study abroad. But at last Pole told him that if he remained in England, he must of necessity attend the Parliament which was about to assemble, and that if the King’s divorce were discussed, he must speak according to his conscience. Henry then at once gave him leave to go, and even promised to continue his income of 400 ducats yearly.[91]