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 various counties as far north as Yorkshire, which were granted to him on 16 Feb. 1538. Those of the great priory of St. Osith in Essex, and of the monasteries of Colchester in Essex and Launde in Leicestershire were granted to him on 10 April 1540. He also obtained a grant on 4 July 1538 of a portion of the lands taken from the see of Norwich by act of parliament. On 30 Dec. 1537 the king appointed him warden and chief justice itinerant of the royal forests north of Trent. On 2 Nov. 1538 he was made captain of Carisbrook in the Isle of Wight, and on 4 Jan. following constable of Leeds Castle in Kent. This is far from an exhaustive account of what he received from the king's bounty, or helped himself to by virtue of his position, even during the last four years of his life, when he was lord privy seal.

Some anecdotes are recorded by his admirer, Foxe, of the mode in which he personally exercised authority at this time. Two cases, both of which are highly applauded by the martyrologist, may serve as examples. Happening to meet in the street a certain serving-man who ‘used to go with his hair hanging about his ears down unto his shoulders,’ he asked him if his master or any of his fellows wore their hair in such fashion, or how he dared to do so. The man for his excuse saying that he had made a vow, Cromwell said he would not have him break it, but he should go to prison till it was fulfilled. So also happening to meet one Friar Bartley near St. Paul's still wearing his cowl after the suppression, ‘Yea,’ said Cromwell, ‘will not that cowl of yours be left off yet? And if I hear by one o'clock that this apparel be not changed, thou shalt be hanged immediately, for example to all others.’ The friar took good care not to wear it again.

In 1539 he was made lord great chamberlain of England. The same year he negotiated the king's marriage with Anne of Cleves, which took place in January following; and, as if specially in reward for his services in this matter, he was on 17 April 1540 created Earl of Essex. But his career was now near its close. On 10 June the Duke of Norfolk accused him of treason at the council table, and he was immediately arrested and sent to the Tower (Journals of the House of Lords, i. 143). A long indictment was framed against him for liberating prisoners accused of misprision, for receiving bribes for licenses to export money, corn, and horses, for giving out commissions without the king's knowledge, for dispersing heretical books, and for a number of other things; in addition to which it was hinted in foreign courts that he had been so ambitious as to form a design of marrying the Princess Mary and making himself king. He was, however, refused a regular trial. The lords proceeded against him by a bill of attainder, which was read a second and a third time without opposition on 19 June. It was then sent down to the commons, where it appears to have been recast, and reappeared in the lords on the 29th, when it was approved in its altered form, and passed through all its stages. In the upper house Cromwell had not a friend from the first except Cranmer, whose good offices only went so far as timidly to plead with the king in his favour before the second reading of the bill. Out of doors he had the sympathy of those who disliked the catholic reaction: for his fall was mainly due, not merely and perhaps not even so much to the king's personal disgust at the marriage with Anne of Cleves, which he had negotiated, as to the fact that the alliance with the German protestants, of which that marriage was to have been the seal, had served its purpose; there was nothing more to be got out of it.

Cromwell was left in prison for nearly seven weeks after his arrest; and whether he was to be beheaded or burned as a heretic was for a time uncertain. In the interval he wrote to the king disowning all traitorous intentions and imploring mercy. The king did not answer, but sent the lord chancellor, the Duke of Norfolk, and the Earl of Southampton to visit him in prison, and extract from him, as one doomed to die, a full confession of all he knew touching the marriage with Anne of Cleves. It was in Cromwell's power, in fact, by revealing some filthy conversations that he had had with the king, to supply evidence tending to show that the marriage had not been really consummated, and to put these conversations upon record was the last service the fallen minister could do for his ungrateful master. Cromwell wrote the whole particulars and concluded an abject letter with the appeal: ‘Most gracious prince, I cry mercy, mercy, mercy!’ But the king, who, according to Burnet, had the letter three times read to him, left the writer to his fate. On 28 July he was brought to the scaffold on Tower Hill, and after an address to the people, declaring that he died in the catholic faith and repudiated all heresy, his head was chopped off by a clumsy executioner in a manner more than usually revolting.

A year before his death he had seen his son Gregory summoned to parliament as a peer of the realm, and the title of Baron Cromwell, previously held by his father, instead of being lost by attainder, was granted to the young man by patent on 18 Dec.