Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/69

 less this fact, the difficulty which we experience in realising the men of comparatively modern ideas acting under circumstances so very much the reverse of modern, which makes the characters of some of the more distinguished men of that period such a puzzle to us, and which causes them to be painted in such widely different colours, by writers who are far removed from mere prejudice or conscious partisanship.

This is a reflection, the truth of which will strike us more and more as we proceed. The statesmen of Henry VIII.'s reign were men of like passions with ourselves. Had they lived in other times they might have been like the statesmen that have followed them—like Walpole or Pulteney, Chatham or Bute, Pitt, Peel, or Palmerston; but it is surely not too much to say that these modern statesmen would have been very different from what they were, had they lived all their time with a halter round their necks, and worked under a master who, upon almost any displeasure conceived against them, instead of merely accepting their resignation would have ordered them at once to the block. When we perceive the difficulty which a modern statesman finds in preserving a strict integrity, when the price he may have to pay for it is the loss of office and popularity, and the defeat at worst of some cherished plan for the benefit as he conceives it, of his country, and that loss in most cases a merely temporary one; and when he is left in possession, at the worst, of wealth and friends and high social position, and the prospect of restoration to more than his former greatness by the next turn of the political wheel, can we wonder if Wolsey and Cranmer and Cromwell and Gardiner, when, in addition to all this, the stake for which they played included their own heads and the complete finality which decapitation