Of the King’s chief adviser in these terrible doings we have as yet said nothing, but it becomes necessary to do so now. Thomas Cromwell, who had risen from low estate, and whose early history is almost a blank to us, after a youth spent on the Continent, was appointed by Wolsey collector of his revenues of the see of York, entered Parliament in 1523 and became a member of Gray’s Inn. Wolsey leaned much upon him, made him one of the commissioners appointed (1525) to inquire into the conditions of the smaller monasteries—and in this work he acted with great harshness—and he also managed the work of the foundation of the Cardinal’s Colleges at Oxford and Ipswich. He seems to have remained faithful to Wolsey to the end, but it was he more than any one who persuaded Henry VIII to make himself supreme head of the Church by way of facilitating his divorce from Katharine, and he rose high in favour with the King and became Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1535 he was made Vicar-General for a general visitation of churches, monasteries and clergy, was rewarded with large gifts of confiscated church lands, and was made Lord Chamberlain in 1539. This was the culmination of a career clever and wary, but tyrannical and oppressive to the English nation and utterly unprincipled towards foreign powers. His fall, which had long been desired by the Catholic party in England, was hastened by his negotiating the King’s marriage with Anne of Cleves. Henry’s disgust at his first sight of his affianced bride would not have sufficed to cause the agent’s ruin, but the alliance with German Protestants, of which the marriage was to be the seal, was unpopular, and as it had served its purpose, nothing more was to be got out of it. For arranging the marriage he was created Earl of Essex April 1540, and on June 10 following the Duke of Norfolk denounced him as a traitor at the Council board, and he was at once sent to the Tower, charged with receiving bribes wholesale, selling commissions, secretly dispersing heretical books, and designing to marry the Princess Mary and make himself King. He was not tried but proceeded against by attainder. Archbishop Cranmer vainly tried to stem the tide. He was beheaded on Tower Green July 28, 1540. It was one sign of a Catholic reaction. The Tower and other metropolitan prisons were crowded with Protestant heretics, who were dragged away on hurdles and burnt in Smithfield, as were also some Catholics at the very same period for denying the King’s supremacy. Anne of Cleves was married to Henry on January 6, 1540, and divorced in July following. She lived the rest of her life in England with a pension, quite content, and rode in the procession along with the Princess Elizabeth at Queen Mary’s coronation. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, August 1557.