The fall of Cromwell had, as it was intended to do, provided Henry with a scapegoat. The spoliation and destruction of the religious houses, by which the King and many of the Catholic nobles had profited enormously, was laid to the dead man's door; the policy of plundering the Church, of union with Lutherans, and the favouring of heresy, had been the work of the wicked minister, and not of the good King--that ill-served and ungratefully-used King, who was always innocent, and never in the wrong, who simply differed from other good Catholics in his independence of the Bishop of Rome: merely a domestic disagreement. With such suave hypocrisy as this difficulties were soon smoothed over; and to prove the perfect sincerity with which Henry proceeded, Protestants like Barnes, Garrard, and Jerome were burnt impartially side by side with Catholics who did not accept the spiritual supremacy of Henry over the Church in England, such as Abell, Powell, Fetherstone, and Cook. The Catholic and aristocratic party in England had thus triumphed all along the line, by the aid of anti-Protestant Churchmen like Gardiner and Tunstal. Their heavy-handed enemy, Cromwell, had gone, bearing the whole responsibility for the past; the King had been flattered by exoneration from blame, and pleased by the release from his wife, so deftly and pleasantly effected. No one but Cromwell was to blame for anything: they were all good Catholics, whom the other Catholic powers surely could not attack for a paltry quarrel with the Pope; and, best of all, the ecclesiastical spoil was secured to them and their heirs for ever, for they all maintained the supremacy of the King in England, good Catholics though they were.