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 it was accomplished. The time at which Henry and Cromwell chose to separate from Rome on grounds which had nothing to do with doctrine, chanced to coincide with that at which other persons elsewhere were doing the same thing for reasons distinctly doctrinal, and at which doctrinal differences with Rome were rising up all over the civilised world. Hence it became impossible but that the fact of the separation itself should tend to foster the doctrinal differences already growing up in England, though these were in themselves not only not shared by Henry but positively distasteful to him.

Whatever we may think either of the moral characteristics of the man, of the ends for which he worked, or of the means which he employed in pursuing them, it will hardly be denied that the world has seen no bolder statesman than Thomas Cromwell, and few more original; yet, like all so-called original ideas, his were not the spontaneous offspring of his own brain, but were suggested to him in a great degree by the phenomena which he saw around him. Cromwell had been for years Wolsey's confidential man of business; had watched his modes of working from a ground of vantage, and had been employed by him in the business of the suppression of the small monasteries, out of which Wolsey founded his colleges at Oxford and at Ipswich. From all this Cromwell had not failed to learn much. He had seen Wolsey concentrating all the power of the State in the hands of the King, and so indirectly in his own, and he had, further, seen him use his position as cardinal and legate to intercept, as it were, the stream of ecclesiastical administration in its natural course between England and Rome by deciding most of the appeals himself, though always professedly as the