tainder of treason against the maid; Bocking, a monk of Canterbury; Maister, the rector of her parish of Allington; Dering, a monk; Gold, bachelor of divinity; Rich, a friar; and Risby, a gentleman; and then a bill of misprision of treason against several other persons of greater note, who were charged with having had communications with the false prophetess, and with having concealed her treasonable predictions. On the 21st of April, the poor maid and the six men attainted of treason were conveyed to Tyburn, and there hanged, drawn, and quartered in the old bestial manner. According to the somewhat suspected authority of the contemporary annalists who belonged to the party adverse to her, the poor prophetess, at the place of execution, not only repeated the declaration which she had made at St. Paul's Cross, but also confessed that she had been prompted by learned men, who had endeavoured to turn her prophesyings to their own advantage. Among those accused of holding correspondence with the holy maid were Edward Thwaites, gentleman; Thomas Laurence, registrar to the Archdeacon of Canterbury; John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester; and Sir Thomas More, late lord chancellor. But More's name was struck out of the bill of misprision of treason before the bill was submitted to parliament. This was done by the king, in the vain belief that he could terrify a fearless man by the prospect of so narrow an escape, and win him over to compliances by his present gratitude or by his fears for the future. Accordingly the attempt was made; More was summoned before the present Chancellor Audley, the Lord Archbishop Cranmer, the Duke of Norfolk, and the unscrupulous Thomas Cromwell; but he stood firm and erect, and was neither to be moved by their entreaties nor by their threats, although these last were delivered in the king's name, and were loud and terrible. Hereupon Henry swore that More's name should be put into the bloody statute, and that he would go himself to the House to see the bill pass quickly. The chancellor and some of his colleagues, more anxious to save appearances than to support law and justice, had implored their

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master to forbear, lest he should be dishonoured throughout Christendom. These ministers said that More's innocence with respect to the prophesyings of the Kentish maid was so clear, that mayhap the parliament would not pass the bill at all if his name were in it; that it would be better for the king to wait awhile for the gratification of his vengeance against More, and they doubted not. soon to find a meet occasion "to serve his turn." the last cheering prospect the bloodthirsty tyrant yielded, and More's name was not inserted. When his beloved daughter Margaret Roper spoke with a transport of joy to her father about this escape, More said, "In faith, Meg, what is put off is not given up-quod differtur non aufertur." When the Duke of Norfolk said to him, "By the mass! Master More, it is perilous striving with princes! The anger of a prince brings death!" the imperturbable man replied, "Is that all, my Lord? Then the difference between you and me is but this, that I shall die to-day and you to-morrow." And before this reign of terror closed, the great Norfolk was attainted of treason, his accomplished son the Earl of Surrey was beheaded, and he himself only escaped by Henry's dying in the night before the morning fixed for his execution.

Ministers soon found the opportunity they wished for to serve their master's turn. An infamous statute was hurried through parliament, making it high treason after the 1st of May, 1534, to write, speak, do, or say anything against the king's lawful matrimony with Queen Anne, and enjoining all persons to take an oath to maintain the whole contents of the statute. On the 30th of March, the day of closing the session, when there was no time for debating upon it, the Chancellor Audley read the king's letters patent prescribing the form of the oath to be taken, and appointing Archbishop Cranmer, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, and the chancellor to be commissioners for exacting and receiving the said oath. This was a trap for More and Fisher, but it caught many others. Within a fortnight Sir Thomas was summoned from his quiet house at Chelsea, to which he never re

turned again, to the archiepiscopal palace at Lambeth, there to appear before Cranmer and the three other oathcommissioners. On his way across the river he whispered to his son-in-law, "Son Roper! I thank our Lord the field is won!" By this he meant that he had triumphed over his natural affections, and was ready to die rather than sully his conscience. The commissioners made him read the statute and the form of the oath, and then called upon him to swear. This More declined doing, but at the same time offered to swear to the maintenance of the order of succession to the throne as established by parliament. He could not, he said, swear to the whole contents without offending against his own conscience; but he was quite ready to take an oath that in the refusal he was actuated by nothing but pure scruples of conscience. The commissioners said that Lords and Commons and Bishops had taken the oath without any scruple at all, and that he was the first recusant; but the prisoner, knowing that no sincere Catholic could take it except with mental reservation, and being determined not to make the pliability of their consciences the rule of his, was not to be moved. He was committed to the custody of the abbot of Westminster, and on the 17th of April, 1534, the fourth day after his summons before the commissioners, he was sent to the Tower, from which there was now no issue to prisoners except to the scaffold. His friend Fisher was there before him, and although they were confined in separate cells, they contrived to comfort one another by an interchange of messages and notes. His wife Alice, who could no more comprehend his scruples than his wit, was an indifferent comforter to More. * She said to him bluntly, "How can a man taken for wise, like you, play the fool in this close filthy prison, when you might be

*This second wife, by whom he had no children, was Mrs. Alice Middleton, a widow in London when he married her. In his book of Comfort in Tribulation,' he calls this second wife" a jolly master-woman," and says that she would oft times rate her husband because he had no mind to set himself forward in the world, saying to him, "Tillie vally, Tillie vally! will you sit and make goslings in the ashes? My mother has often said unto me, it is better to

abroad at your liberty, if you would but do as the bishops have done?" She tried to tempt him into weakness and submission by speaking of his fair house at Chelsea, his garden and orchard, his gallery and library, his desolate wife and weeping children. His affectionate daughter, Margaret Roper, had a nobler soul, and she administered to his moral strength, instead of trying to create a weakness within him. By the savage order of the king they deprived the glorious wit and scholar of the solace of his books, and of the use of pen, ink, and paper. But some commiserating jailor put scraps of paper in his way, and upon them, and with pieces of charcoal, he wrote notes to Fisher and to the daughter that was so worthy of him. Not filthy prison, nor the imminent scaffold, could quench the old spirit in him. His witty conceits flowed from him in that dungeon as readily as Fuller's flowed from his pen when that rich humourist was writing at his ease in happier times in his own pleasant study. When they took his books and pens from him, he shut up his prison-window, saying, "Now the wares are gone and the tools taken away, we must shut up shop." In one of the last letters he wrote with charcoal to his highminded daughter Margaret, he said "If I were to declare in writing how much pleasure your daughterly loving letters give me, a peck of coals would not suffice to make the pens.' For a long period he was denied all resort of family or friends; and when his dearest child was first admitted into the Tower to see him, it appears to have been in the expectation that her grief and tenderness would soften him. Without any need of the spirit of prophecy, but from a mere reviewal rule than to be ruled." Possibly this hatching of goslings in the ashes may have had reference to some experiments or amusements of More, who may have learned in Herodotus the process of the ancient Egyptians, and who says, in his political romance, that the Utopians hatch their poultry by means of a gentle artificial heat.

Mistress Alice, however, had many good qualities, and More, whose temper could not be ruffled, seems to have lived happily with her.

of the character of the king and his court, he could easily foretell the fate that awaited the fair cause of all his misfortunes. On one occasion he asked Margaret Roper how it fared with Queen Anne? "In faith, father,' said she, 66 never better." "Never better, Meg," quoth he; "alas! Meg, it pityeth me to remember into what misery, poor soul, she shall shortly come !" On the 2nd or 3rd of May, 1535, when he had been more than a year in his foul and hungry prison, he was visited by Cromwell, the attorney and solicitor-general, and certain civilians, who urged him to recognise the statute which made the king supreme head of the church. More replied, "I am the king's true and faithful subject and daily beadsman. I pray for his highness, and all his, and all the realm. I do nobody harm, I say no harm, I think none harm, and wish everybody good; and if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith, I long not to live. I am dying already, and since I came here have been divers time in the cases that I thought to die within one hour. And I thank our Lord I was never sorry for it, but rather sorry when I saw the pang past; and therefore my poor body is at the king's pleasure. Would to God my death might do him good."* This fruitless visit was followed by another in a few days, when Cromwell was accompanied by Archbishop Cranmer, Audley the chancellor, the Duke of Suffolk, and the Earl of Wiltshire, the said earl being Anne Boleyn's father. They reasoned and threatened; and Cromwell told him that unless he yielded he must die, for that “his grace the king would follow the course of his laws towards such as he should find obstinate." Cranmer, who too often followed evil counsels with his eyes open to their wickedness, but who often leaned to mercy and justice, without having the courage to risk the displeasure of his tyrannical master by opposing his will in anything— Cranmer, who ought never to have entered upon such business at all, but who had taken a very prominent part in all its stages, as is proved by his own letters, now wrote a persuasive but timid letter to Cromwell, praying

* Roper.