In this single specimen we may see a complete image of Wolsey’s persecution, as with varying details it was carried out in every town and village from the Tweed to the Land’s End.  I dwell on the stories of individual suffering, not to colour the narrative, or to re-awaken feelings of bitterness which may well rest now and sleep for ever; but because, through the years in which it was struggling for recognition, the history of Protestantism is the history of its martyrs.  No rival theology, as I have said, had as yet shaped itself into formulas.  We have not to trace any slow growing elaboration of opinion.  Protestantism, before it became an establishment, was a refusal to live any longer in a lie.  It was a falling back upon the undefined untheoretic rules of truth and piety which lay upon the surface of the Bible, and a determination rather to die than to mock with unreality any longer the Almighty Maker of the world.  We do not look in the dawning manifestations of such a spirit for subtleties of intellect.  Intellect, as it ever does, followed in the wake of the higher virtues of manly honesty and truthfulness.  And the evidences which were to effect the world’s conversion were so cunningly arranged syllogistic demonstrations, but once more those loftier evidences which lay in the calm endurance by heroic men of the extremities of suffering, and which touched—­not the mind with conviction, but the heart with admiring reverence.

In the concluding years of his administration Wolsey was embarrassed with the divorce.  Difficulties were gathering round him, from the failure of his hopes abroad and the wreck of his popularity at home; and the activity of the persecution was something relaxed, as the guiding mind of the great minister ceased to have leisure to attend to it.  The bishops, however, continued, each in his own diocese, to act with such vigour as they possessed.  Their courts were unceasingly occupied with vexatious suits, commenced without reason, and conducted without justice.  They summoned arbitrarily as suspected offenders whoever had the misfortune to have provoked their dislike; either compelling them to criminate themselves by questions on the intricacies of theology,[533] or allowing sentence to be passed against them on the evidence of abandoned persons, who would not have been admissible as witnesses before the secular tribunals.[534]

It might have been thought that the clear perception which was shown by the House of Commons of the injustice with which the trials for heresy were conducted, the disregard, shameless and flagrant, of the provisions of the statutes under which the bishops were enabled to proceed, might have led them to reconsider the equity of persecution in itself; or, at least, to remove from the office of judges persons who had shown themselves so signally unfit to exercise that office.  It would have been indecent, however, if not impossible, to transfer to a civil tribunal the cognisance of