To make the King absolute, and himself to rule through the King, was the one aim of the man whom Fox, the Martyrologist, grotesquely calls “The valiant soldier of Christ:”--for this end he smote down the Church and the nobility: Bishop Fisher and the Carthusians represented the ecclesiastical world, the Courtenays and the Poles the aristocracy, Sir Thomas More the new-born culture of the time; and Cromwell chose his victims from the noblest and the best. The piety of Fisher, once the King’s tutor, to whom his mother had committed her royal boy on her death-bed, could not save him; nor his learning, Sir Thomas More; nor her grey hairs, the Countess of Salisbury. Spies were scattered through the land; it was dangerous to speak one’s mind in one’s own house; nay, the new inquisition claimed empire over men’s thoughts; we have seen that the concealment of one’s sentiments was treason. Will my more youthful readers wonder then that men could be found to convict upon such charges as those preferred against the aged Abbot of Glastonbury? They need wonder at nothing that occurred while Bloody Harry was King, and Thomas Cromwell Prime Minister. The juries themselves sat with a rope around their necks; when the Prior and the chief brethren of the Charter-house waited upon Cromwell to explain their conscientious objections to the Oath of Supremacy, loyally and faithfully, he sent them from his house to the tower; when the juries would not convict the ecclesiastics, he detained them in court a second day, and threatened them with the punishment reserved for the prisoners, unless they found a verdict for the crown; finally, he visited the jurymen in person, and by individual intimidation forced the reluctant men to find a verdict of guilty, whereupon the unfortunate monks were hanged, drawn, and quartered, with every circumstance of barbarity, suspended, cut down alive, disembowelled, and finally dismembered.[17] Thursday, the fourteenth of November, 1539, was a gloomy day: black leaden clouds floated above, the ground was sodden with moisture, the leaves, fallen leaves, no inapt emblem, rotted in the slime, a heavy damp air oppressed the breath; the day suited the deed, for on that day the aged Abbot of Glastonbury was formally arraigned at Wells, together with his brethren the Prior and Sub-Prior, on the charge of felony,--“Robbery of the Abbey Church with intent to defraud the King.” They might well have proceeded against him under the Act of Supremacy, but variety has charms, and this new idea of felony commended itself to the mind of Cromwell, as a good device for humbling the clergy. Lord Russell, one of Henry’s new nobility who supplied the places left vacant by so many ruthless executions, whose own fortunes were built on the plunder of the Church, sat as judge, and there were empannelled, we are told, “as worshipful a jury as was ever charged in Wells.”