opinion; and, on the other hand, there was as yet among the upper classes of the laity no kind of disposition to be lenient towards those who were really unorthodox.  The desire so far was only to check the reckless and random accusations of persons whose offence was to have criticised, not the doctrine but the moral conduct, of the church authorities.  The Protestants, although from the date of the meeting of the parliament and Wolsey’s fall their ultimate triumph was certain, gained nothing in its immediate consequences.  They suffered rather from the eagerness of the political reformers to clear themselves from complicity with heterodoxy; and the bishops were even taunted with the spiritual dissensions of the realm as an evidence of their indolence and misconduct.[535] Language of this kind boded ill for the “Christian Brethren;” and the choice of Wolsey’s successor for the office of chancellor soon confirmed their apprehensions; Wolsey had chastised them with whips; Sir Thomas More would chastise them with scorpions; and the philosopher of the Utopia, the friend of Erasmus, whose life was of blameless beauty, whose genius was cultivated to the highest attainable perfection, was to prove to the world that the spirit of persecution is no peculiar attribute of the pedant, the bigot, of the fanatic, but may co-exist with the fairest graces of the human character.  The lives of remarkable men usually illustrate some emphatic truth.  Sir Thomas More may be said to have lived to illustrate the necessary tendencies of Romanism in an honest mind convinced of its truth; to show that the test of sincerity in a man who professes to regard orthodoxy as an essential of salvation, is not the readiness to endure persecution, but the courage which will venture to inflict it.

The seals were delivered to the new chancellor in November, 1529.  By his oath on entering office he was bound to exert himself to the utmost for the suppression of heretics:[536] he was bound, however, equally to obey the conditions under which the law allowed them to be suppressed.  Unfortunately for his reputation as a judge, he permitted the hatred of “that kind of men,” which he did not conceal that he felt,[537] to obscure his conscience on this important feature of his duty, and tempt him to imitate the worst iniquities of the bishops.  I do not intend in this place to relate the stories of his cruelties in his house at Chelsea,[538] which he himself partially denied, and which at least we may hope were exaggerated.  Being obliged to confine myself to specific instances, I choose rather those on which the evidence is not open to question; and which prove against More, not the zealous execution of a cruel law, for which we may not fairly hold him responsible, but a disregard, in the highest degree censurable, of his obligations as a judge.

The acts under which heretics were liable to punishment, were the 15th of the 2nd of Henry IV., and the 1st of the 2nd of Henry V.