“And as for my Lord Prevye Sealle, I wold not be in his case for all that ever he hathe, for the King beknaveth him twice a weke, and some-tyme knocke him well about thee pate; and yet when he hathe bene well pomeld aboute the hedde, and shaken up, as it were a dogge, he will come out into the great chambre, shaking of the bushe with as mery a countenance as thoughe he mought rule all the roste.”[210] Though good-natured where his interests were not involved, he appears to have been callous to the sight of pain, and not only attended to the racking of important witnesses, but went in state to see Father Forest roasted in chains for denying the royal supremacy, which he was labouring to establish. His behaviour to Lambert, whom he sent to the fire for confessing his own principles, astonished even those who knew him well. How he became a Protestant is uncertain; Foxe thought, by reading Erasmus’s translation of the New Testament. More probably he was sceptical because he was of the economic type. At all events, he hated Rome, and Foxe said that in 1538 he was “the chief friend of the gospellers.” In that same year Lambert was tried for heresy regarding transubstantiation, and it was then Cromwell sentenced him to be burned alive. Characteristically, he is said to have invited him to breakfast on the morning of the execution, and to have then begged his pardon for what he had done. Pole described a conversation he had with Essex about the duty of ministers to kings. Pole thought their first obligation was to consider their masters’ honour, and insisted on the divergence between honour and expediency. Such notions seemed fantastic to Cromwell, who told Pole that a prudent politician would study a prince’s inclinations and act accordingly. He then offered Pole a manuscript of Machiavelli’s _Prince_. Such a temperament differed, not so much in degree as in kind, from that of Godfrey de Bouillon or Saint Louis, Bayard or the Black Prince. It was subtler, more acquisitive, more tenacious of life, and men and women of the breed of Cromwell rose rapidly to be the owners of England during the sixteenth century. Social standards changed. Even in semi-barbarous ages a lofty courtesy had always been deemed befitting the great. Saint Anselm and Héloïse, Saladin and Cœur-de-Lion have remained ideals for centuries, because they represented a phase of civilization; and Froissart has described how the Black Prince entertained his prisoners after Poitiers:-- “The prince himself served the king’s table, as well as the others, with every mark of humility, and would not sit down at it, in spite of all his entreaties for him so to do, saying that ‘he was not worthy of such an honour, nor did it appertain to him to seat himself at the table of so great a king, or of so valiant a man as he had shown himself by his actions that day.’”[211]