For once, however, a point had been overlooked: it appeared impossible lawfully to proceed to extremities on the ground of refusal to take the oath. The omission was rectified in the next session of Parliament. In a fresh Act of Succession, the oath as administered was expressly ratified, and the occasion was seized to pass a new Treasons Act, inadequately described as drastic. It was made treason to question the titles of the queen and the heirs apparent, or to impute heresy or schism to the king; and the lawyers were able so to interpret it that mere silence might be construed as treason--it was enough to refuse to affirm the Supremacy and the rest of it. The two new Acts were brought to bear on the victims, who remained firm and were executed in the following summer. There is no shadow of a hint anywhere that Cromwell suffered a single qualm in working out the destruction of either More or Fisher, but it is hardly necessary to make him responsible for the equally ruthless attitude of the king. According to Roper’s circumstantial narrative, Henry was so vindictive towards More when once he had turned against him, that he could hardly be persuaded to have him left out of the Bill of Attainder in the affair of the Nun of Kent, until the Chancellor, Lord Audley, and others succeeded in convincing him that Parliament could not possibly pass the Bill with More’s name included. If ever there was a chance of life for Fisher and More, it was destroyed when Henry’s fury was roused by the new Pope making Fisher a Cardinal. These facts illustrate the difference between Henry’s attitude and Cromwell’s. To Cromwell, More and Fisher are merely obstructions to his policy. They must either cease to obstruct or be crushed. To spare them for sentimental reasons would be absurd, but there is no passion or vindictiveness or animosity about their destruction, as far as he is concerned.
Never had any king of England wielded so deadly an engine of despotism as was placed in Henry’s hands by this Treasons Act of Cromwell; whereof, however, the full force depended on its manipulation by its designer. The country was in a very short time so sown with the minister’s spies that the moment any one became obnoxious to authority it was the simplest thing possible to procure an information of a hasty word spoken or passed by in silence, of a phrase that might have carried a double meaning; and the victim’s doom was virtually sealed. The excuse, of course, was the one on which a tyranny that seeks to justify itself invariably falls back--that an unparalleled emergency demands extraordinary powers. It was not, indeed, quite obvious that there was an unparalleled emergency in existence, but then it might arise at any moment. Cromwell was going on to a series of measures which might prove acceptable, but might on the other hand provoke a storm of indignation. With the Treasons Act ready to his hand, he could anticipate conspiracy by striking wherever and whenever it pleased him. It was an integral part of his political theory that Government--_i.e._ the Despot--should have that power. It was not, of course, aimed specifically at the Church; it was only incidentally concerned with More and Fisher. The repression of clericalism was only a part of the scheme for a legalised Despotism. The climax, the theoretical coping-stone of the edifice, was not achieved till the Act which in 1539 gave Royal Proclamations the force of law; but for practical purposes, the Treasons Act made Henry a monarch more absolute than any other in Christendom.