All present cried out:  “Let us die together in our integrity, and heaven and earth shall witness for us how unjustly we are cut off.”  Prior Houghton conceived a generous idea.  “If it depends on me alone; if my oath will suffice for the house, I will throw myself on the mercy of God; I will make myself anathema, and to preserve you from these dangers, I will consent to the king’s will.”  Thus did the noble old man consent to go into heaven with a lie on his conscience, hoping to escape by the mercy of God, because he sought to save the lives of his brethren.  But all this was of no avail; Cromwell had determined that this monastery must fall, and fall it did.  The monks prepared for their end calmly and nobly; beginning with the oldest brother, they knelt before each other and begged forgiveness for all unkindness and offence.  “Not less deserving,” says Froude, “the everlasting remembrances of mankind, than those three hundred, who, in the summer morning, sate combing their golden hair in the passes of Thermopylae.”  But rebellion was blazing in Ireland, and the enemies of the king were praying and plotting for his ruin.  These monks, with More and Fisher, were an inspiration to the enemies of liberty and the kingdom.  Catholic Europe crouched like a tiger ready to spring on her prostrate foe.  It is sad, but these recluses, praying for the pope, instilling a love for the papacy in the confessional, these honest and conscientious but dangerous men must be shorn of their power to encourage rebels.  There was a farce of a trial.  Houghton was brought to the scaffold and died protesting his innocence.  His arm was cut off and hung over the archway of the Charterhouse, as other arms and heads were hideously hanging over many a monastic gate in Merry England.  Nine of the monks died of prison fever, and others were banished.  The king’s court went into mourning, and Henry knotted his beard and henceforth would be no more shaven—­eloquent evidence to the world that whatever motive dominated the king’s heart, these bloody deeds were unpleasantly disturbing.  Certainly such a spectacle as that of a monk’s arm nailed to a monastery was never seen by Englishmen before.

The Charterhouse fell, let it be carefully noted, because the monks could not and would not acknowledge the king’s supremacy, and not because the monks were immoral.  Some spies in Cromwell’s service offered to, bring in evidence against six of these monks of “laziness and immorality.”  Cromwell indignantly refused the proposal, saying, “He would not hear the accusation; that it was false, wilfully so.”

The news of these proceedings, and of the beheading of More and Fisher, awakened the most violent rage throughout Catholic Europe.  Henry was denounced as the Nero of his times.  Paul III. immediately excommunicated the king, dissolved all leagues between Henry and the Catholic princes, and gave his kingdom to any invader.  All Catholic subjects were ordered to take up arms against him.  Although these censures