involves as well, should have failed to maintain on all occasions the high level of an ideal morality? In studying the history of the Reformation in England, nothing is more necessary than to keep its different stages distinct from one another. We are too apt to think of the Reformation as if it had been all one process, or at least as if some person or persons had deliberately set it going, with a distinct perception of the results to which it was to lead, and had consciously adapted the means employed to the production of those results. Such a notion is not only not true, but is almost the direct reverse of the truth. The many recent additions to our materials for the history of the Reformation in England, all seem to me to point to the conclusion that, of several persons who may be named as the chief agents in bringing it about, the only one who set a distinct object before his eyes and worked constantly for it was Thomas Cromwell; and with him the Reformation of religion was not the object at which he aimed, but was only incidentally connected with it. Cromwell intended to make Henry VIII. absolute master of England, and himself absolute master of Henry VIII.[1] He succeeded in the first object, and the absolutism which he constructed maintained its ground in a greater or less degree as long as there remained a Tudor sovereign to wield it, and even subsisted through more than a generation of Stuart feebleness and triviality. In his second object he very nearly succeeded also, but at last he fell into the error, so often fatal to strong and successful statesmen, of overrating his own power, thinking that what had already done so much could
- ↑ He is said to have boasted that in brief time he would bring things to such a pass that the King, with all his power, should not be able to hinder him. (See Green, Short Hist. p. 348.)
