A reign of terror, organized with consummate and merciless skill, held England panic-stricken at Henry's feet.

The noblest heads rolled from the block.

Virtue and learning could not save Thomas More; royal descent could not save Lady Salisbury.

The putting away of one queen, the execution of another, taught England that nothing was too high for Henry's "courage" or too sacred for his "appetite." Parliament assembled only to sanction acts of unscrupulous tyranny, or to build up by its own statutes the fabric of absolute rule.
All the constitutional safeguards of English freedom were swept away.
Arbitrary taxation, arbitrary legislation, arbitrary imprisonment were powers claimed without dispute and unsparingly used by the Crown.
The history of this great revolution, for it is nothing less, is the history of a single man.

In the whole line of English statesmen there is no one of whom we would willingly know so much, no one of whom we really know so little, as of Thomas Cromwell.