your often most gracious, grave counsels and advertisements, then it had not been with me as now it is. Yet our Lord, if it be his will, can do with me as he did with Susan, who was falsely accused. . . . If I would not.... willingly die for your comfort, I would I were in hell, and I would I should receive a thousand deaths." All this may not be thought very dignified; but it seems to betray strength of conviction if not strength of character, and rather an excessive ardour of temperament than that cold Machiavelism and absence of all principle which is imputed to Cromwell by the Romish writers. He went to his death in that perplexing manner of which we have several other examples in this reign, leaving the true character and meaning of his whole life and conduct uncertain and disputable if we were to attempt to make it out only from his dying words. He was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 28th of July, and in a speech which he made on the scaffold, after thanking God for having appointed him such a death for his offences, and remarking that he had been a great traveller in the world, and, being but of a base degree, had been called to great estate, and since coming thereunto had offended his prince, for which he heartily asked him forgiveness, he added, “ And now I pray you that be here to bear me record, I die in the Catholic faith, not doubting in any article of my faith, no, nor doubting in any sacrament of the Church. Many hath slandered me, and reported that I have been a bearer of such as have maintained evil opinions, which is untrue ; but I confess, that, like as God by his holy spirit doth instruct us in the truth, so the devil is ready to seduce us, and I have been seduced ; but bear me witness that I die in the Catholic faith of the Holy Church.” It seems hardly possible to interpret these expressions as meaning any thing else than that he had at one time held certain heretical opinions which he now renounced; if not this, what did he mean by saying that he had been seduced, but that he now died in the Catholic faith ? Nevertheless Burnet, although he confesses that, “ by what he spoke at his death, he left it much doubted of what religion he died,”

" The term Catholic faith,” Burnet goes on, “used by him in his last speech, seemed to make it doubtful; but that was then used in England in its true sense, in opposition to the novelties of the see of Rome ... So that his profession of the Catholic faith was strangely perverted, when some from thence concluded that he died in the communion of the Church of Rome. But his praying in English, and that only to God through Christ, with out any of those tricks that were used when those of that church died, showed he was none of theirs."