Page:Divorce of Catherine of Aragon.djvu/481

Rh changes. Chapuys's counsels tempted them into more dangerous and less pardonable roads. By encouraging them in secret conspiracies he made them a menace to the peace of the realm. He brought Fisher to the block. He forced the Government to pass the Act of Supremacy as a defence against treason, and was thus the cause also of the execution of Sir Thomas More and the Charterhouse Monks.

To Chapuys, perhaps, and to his faithful imitators later in the century—De Quadra and Mendoza—the country owes the completeness of the success of the Reformation. It was a battle fought out gallantly between two principles—a crisis in the eternal struggle between the old and the new. The Catholics may boast legitimately of their martyrs. But the Protestants have a martyrology longer far and no less honourable, and those who continue to believe that the victory won in England in the sixteenth century was a victory of right over wrong, have no need to blush for the actions of the brave men who, in the pulpit or in the Council Chamber, on the scaffold or at the stake, won for mankind the spiritual liberty which is now the law of the world.