66 AN HISTORICAL VIEW OF THE CHARACTER, &C. 



theless the council, to gratify the eager, watchful vengeance of his 

 royal persecutor, were even willing to travel beyond the sphere of 

 action into thought, with which no human judgment has concern, 

 of which no human observation can take cognizance ; as they 

 sought to interpret his very avoidance of uttering any opinion 

 whatever respecting the supremacy into a flat denial of it. 



In this exigency, to find matter of impeachment against their 

 prisoner. Rich, the then Solicitor General, a man who had a genius 

 for lying, and who has acquired an infamous celebrity in history, as 

 the betrayer of More and Fisher, at last succeeded in inveigling him 

 into a denial of the supremacy ; for by this abandoned tool of the 

 court, he is charged with having said, ''before divers persons, that 

 the king is not supreme head of the church," which accusation, in 

 the cunning verbosity of the statute of 26 Henry VIII., cap. 13, is 

 thus put forth, '^ that the prisoner falsely, maliciously, and traiter- 

 ously wished, willed, devised, and by craft imagined, invented, prac- 

 tised, and attempted to deprive the king of the dignity, title, and 

 name of the supreme head of the church." But though theory and 

 practice were both alike against the act of parliament upon which 

 this indictment was principally founded, inasmuch as it obliterated 

 all distinctions between right and wrong in the understanding, 

 which might naturally enough be expected, when the parliament 

 was willing to become the mere instrument''^ of sanctioning the 

 most arbitrary measures of the king ; yet can the historian of the 

 Reformation resort to the petty-fogging arguments and artifices of 

 legal chicanery t for the justification of proceedings that his, in 

 other respects, sound and pure mind would have taught him to 

 regard as specimens of a sanguinary era, and which memorials of 

 frightful injustice even then might not have been furnished to the 

 philosophical investigation of this age, if the judges who sentenced 

 Fisherf had not been the willing delegates of the vindictive and 



• " There is not," as Madame de Stael observes, " a better instrument of 

 tyranny than an assembly when it is degraded." — Considerations on the French 

 Revolution, English translation, v. iii., p. 178. 



+ See History of the Reform., v. i., par. ii, p. 438. 



X Some have mounted the scaffold with so fixed a determination to astonish 

 their beholders by a display of their heroism, that they died, as it were, with a 

 sort of scenic effect. But Fisher's death was simply 5P*eat, and therefore truly 

 christian. It is so well given by a protestant divine, that we shall not 

 abridge his narration : — " On the morning of his execution he dressed him- 

 self with unusual care, saying that he was preparing to be a bridegroom. As 

 he was conducted to the place of execution, being impeded by the pressure 

 of the crowd, with his New Testament in his hand, he prayed to this effect : 



