Cromwell was hurried to that gloomy fortress whose outlet was generally the scaffold, he was denied even the form of trial.  A bill of attainder was hastily passed by the Parliament he had ruled.  Only one person in the realm had the courage to intercede for him, and this was Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury; but his entreaties were futile.  The fallen minister had no chance of life, and no one knew it so well as himself.  Even a trial would have availed nothing; nothing could have availed him,—­he was a doomed man.  So he bade his foes make quick work of it; and quick work was made.  In eighteen days from his arrest, Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, Knight of the Garter, Grand Chamberlain, Lord Privy Seal, Vicar-General, and Master of the Wards, ascended the scaffold on which had been shed the blood of a queen,—­making no protestation of innocence, but simply committing his soul to Jesus Christ, in whom he believed.  Like Wolsey, he arose from an humble station to the most exalted position the King could give; and, like Wolsey, he saw the vanity of delegated power as soon as he offended the source of power.

    “He who ascends the mountain-tops shall find
     The loftiest peak most wrapped in clouds and storms. 
     Though high above the sun of glory shines,
     And far beneath the earth and ocean spread,
     Round him are icy rocks, and loudly blow
     Contending tempests on his naked head.”

On the disappearance of Cromwell from the stage, Cranmer came forward more prominently, he was a learned doctor in that university which has ever sent forth the apostles of great emancipating movements.  He was born in 1489, and was therefore twenty years of age on the accession of Henry VIII. in 1509, and was twenty-eight when Luther published his theses.  He early sympathized with the reform doctrines, but was too politic to take an active part in their discussion.  He was a moderate, calm, scholarly man, not a great genius or great preacher.  He had none of those bold and dazzling qualities which attract the gaze of the world.  We behold in him no fearless and impetuous Luther,—­ attacking with passionate earnestness the corruptions of Rome; bracing himself up to revolutionary assaults, undaunted before kings and councils, and giving no rest to his hands or slumber to his eyes until he had consummated his protests,—­a man of the people, yet a dictator to princes.  We see no severely logical Calvin,—­pushing out his metaphysical deductions until he had chained the intellect of his party to a system of incomparable grandeur and yet of repulsive austerity, exacting all the while the same allegiance to doctrines which he deduced from the writings of Paul as he did to the direct declarations of Christ; next to Thomas Aquinas, the acutest logician the Church has known; a system-maker, like the great Dominican schoolmen, and their common master and oracle, Saint Augustine of Hippo.  We see in Cranmer no uncompromising and aggressive